Certification of Three Old Cosmic-Ray Emulsion Events asΩ−Decays and Interactions

Abstract

In the pre-accelator years,'' when large stacks of emulsion of exposed to cosmic rays at high altitude, three events were found in which K- mesons were emitted from slowly moving particles. The OMEGA - is the only presently known particle that can give rise to a K- when moving at nonrelativistic speed, but none of the three events has until now been clearly identified as an OMEGA -. One of the cosmic-ray events (Eisenberg, 1954) has been incorrectly interpreted as an OMEGA - decaying in flight; it is now shown to be an interaction in flight of an OMEGA - with a silvwr nuclwus. Thw second event is a clear-cut example of an OMEGA quite complicated, but can be unambigiously attributed to the decay of an OMEGA - atomically bound to an N/sup 14/ nucleus, followed by a collision of the daughter LAMBDA with the N/sup 14/, in which the compound system then mass of the OMEGA - as determined by h the