Search For Charged Strange Quark Matter Produced In 11.5a Gev/C Au+Pb Collisions

We present results of a search for strange quark matter (strangelets) in 11.5A GeV/c Au + Pb collisions from the 1994 and 1995 runs of experiment E864 at Brookhaven's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron. We observe no strangelet candidates and set a 90% confidence level upper limit of approximately 3 X 10(-8) per 10% central interaction for the production of \Z\ = 1 and \Z\ = 2 strangelets over a large mass range and with metastable lifetimes of about 50 ns or more. These results place constraints primarily on quark-gluon plasma based production models for strangelets. [S0031-9007(97)04465-7].