CDMSLITE LIGHTLY IONIZING PARTICLE SEARCH

Abstract

An encouraging avenue of investigation beyond the Standard Model (SM) is the search for particles with fractional electric charge. While the SM does not anticipate the existence of free particles with a fractional electric charge, fractionally charged particles (FCPs) have not been experimentally excluded. Free fractionally charged particles are a feature of viable extensions to the Standard Model with extra U(1) gauge symmetries. This thesis describes a FCP search using CDMSlite Run 2 Period 1 data which results in the first direct detection limits on cosmogenic FCPs with an electric charge as small as e{108 and the most stringent limit on vertical intensity for FCPs with an electric charge § e{160. This analysis is also the first to consider cosmogenic FCPs with a wide range of masses (5 MeV/c2 – 100 TeV/c2) and velocities (