More supporting evidence for the heaviest elementary particle ever proposed has now been received by three Leeds University scientists from Soviet and other sources (see Sechaba Vol. 7 No 8)
Drs Walter Kellermann, Gordon Brooks and John Baruch, all of the University of Leeds - Department of Physics, suggested a particle, the 'Mandela' with a mass of around 40 GeV in May this year, defined by the place of a discontinuity observed in the hadron energy spectrum observed at sea level. Since then none of the data published by other researchers runs contrary to the Leeds explanation and much of it supports it, in particular the CERN work on neutral currents, and exchanges with scientists from the Lebedev Institute of the Academy of Science of the USSR and from Moscow State University indicate support for the Leeds idea.
A great deal of work on the hadronic component of cosmic rays has been done by groups in the USSR working in high altitude laboratories at Tien-Shan and employing very large ionisation calorimeters of area up to 40 sq. metres and depth of the order of 10 interaction lengths. A long interaction length (> 300 g/cm-2) confirming the short range field of the particle would be expected from a comparison of the Leeds and USSR results. This property of the particle is verifiable from a measurement of the angular incidence of the particles in the energy range in question..
Mandelas should arrive through the Earth's atmosphere from a wide angle and not just from vertically overhead. The modified version of the Leeds detector includes a flash tube array which can measure angular incidence as well as detecting the charge/neutral ratio of the proposed particle.
Britain's Institute of Physics has listed the Leeds University 'Mandela' amongst the significant developments in physics during 1973 (Physics Bulletin, December 1973).
Since then researchers at the giant CERN accelerator in Geneva and Soviet cosmic ray workers have put forward new information which generally supports the Leeds evidence. Physicists from the Lebedev Institute of the USSR Academy of Science and from Moscow State University have published new data and are equally convinced that there is a very interesting cosmic radiation effect that needs explanation.