Searching for exotic particles with a 3 MV accelerator

The Caltech 3 MV pelletron accelerator has been used in a variety of experiments to search for exotic particles which may be either stable or produced in nuclear decays. The techniques involve applications of accelerator mass spectrometry as well as more conventional nuclear spectroscopy. Topics of recent interest including the existence of fractionally charged particles, doubly-negative atomic ions, and neutral weakly-interacting pseudoscalars (“axions”) have been investigated.