SEARCH FOR AN ANOMALOUSLY HEAVY ISOTOPE OF OXYGEN

A search has been made for an anomalously heavy isotope of oxygen spanning the mass range 20 to 54 amu with use of a tandem accelerator as an ultrasensitive mass spectrometer. An upper limit of heavy hadron to nucleon ratios was established at 10-16 over the entire mass region and over a large portion of it at 10-18. This ratio is considerably lower than the predictions of cosmological models, namely ∼10-10 to 10-11. © 1979 The American Physical Society.