Observation of a rare cosmic ray event at mountain altitude

Existence of strangelets in cosmic rays has been predicted even at mountain altitudes ∼3-4km with extremely low abundance. We exposed an appropriate passive detector to cosmic rays at Darjeeling, India, at an atmospheric pressure of 765 hPa, as a pilot study to determine its suitability for the detection of strangelets in a large area detector array through long-term exposure. During the analysis we found a highly unusual event consisting of a cluster of six identical nuclear tracks. We argue that even the most mundane explanation of this event requires unusual physics, the first possible observation of multifragmentation involving cosmic rays.