DETECTABILITY OF STRANGE MATTER IN HEAVY-ION EXPERIMENTS

We discuss the properties of two distinct forms of hypothetical strang e matter, small lumps of strange quark matter (strangelets) and of hyp eron matter [metastoble exotic multihypernuclear objects (MEMO's)], wi th special emphasis on their relevance for present and future heavy io n experiments. The masses of small strangelets up to A(B)=40 are calcu lated using the MIT bag model with shell mode filling for various bag parameters. The strangelets are checked for possible strong and weak h adronic decays, also taking into account multiple hadron decays. It is found that strangelets which are stable against strong decay are most likely highly negatively charged, contrary to previous findings. Stra ngelets can be stable against weak hadronic decay but their masses and charges are still rather high. This has serious impact on the present high sensitivity searches in heavy ion experiments at the AGS and CER N facilities. On the other hand, highly charged MEMO's no predicted on the basis of an extended relativistic mean-field model, Those objects could be detected in future experiments searching for short-lived, ra re composites. It is demonstrated that future experiments can be sensi tive to a much wider variety of strangelets.