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Argonne National Laboratory physicists have also examined iron meteor ites, air and sea water in a vain attempt to find quarks that had combined with stable atoms. Instead of being electrically neutral, they reasoned, such atoms would have fractional charges imparted by the quarks—enabling scientists to separate them out in an electric field and analyze them. Because quarks would more likely combine with heavier atoms, one scientist has suggested looking for quark-bearing atoms in oysters, which tend to concentrate the heavier elements in the seas.
30 Miles Up. Arguing that others may have been quark hunting in the wrong places, British Physicists J. B. Hasted and M.R.C. McDowell have suggested a new area of search. As quarks rain down on the earth, the British scientists suggest in their Nature article, those with a negative charge combine with oxygen in the ocean to form fractionally charged quark-oxygen atoms. When the quark-oxygen atoms are carried into the air during the normal evaporation and precipitation cycle, they are repelled by the atmospheric electrical field, which extends some 30 miles above the earth's surface, and are driven into the lower ionosphere. The charged atoms should hover above this level, the scientists say, prevented from settling back to earth by the repelling electric field.
Hasted and McDowell propose to capture the quark-oxygen atom by launching a Venus's-flytrap rocket that would open its jaws at an altitude of 30 miles, adsorb the oxygen atoms on an activated charcoal surface and bring them back to earth. Any oxygen atoms combined with quarks could then be identified by examining the sample with a mass spectrometer, which would separate them out because of their odd mass and fractional charge.
If real evidence of quarks is found, says Hasted, "elementary-particle physics will have taken the next great step forward. It's so important to find quarks that it's worth looking anywhere. But we think that it's much easier to look in the lower ionosphere than anywhere else."
* A name that Gell-Mann borrowed from a line in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "—Three quarks for Muster Mark!"