"Cosmic Rays" from Quark Matter
Abstract
I describe a dark matter candidate based in qcd physics in which the dark matter is composed of macroscopically large "nuggets" of quark and anti-quark matter. These objects may have a sufficiently massive low number density to avoid constraints from direct detection searches. Though not "baryonic" in the conventional sense quark matter is strongly interacting and will produce a clear signal in ground based detectors. As the prospects of detecting these objects are mainly limited by the detector cross-section large scale cosmic ray detectors are a promising search platform. To this end I describe the basic properties of the air shower induced by the passage of a quark nugget through the earth's atmosphere. It will be shown that this shower is similar in several important ways to the shower induced by a single ultrahigh energy cosmic ray.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1006.0899,
title = {"Cosmic Rays" from Quark Matter},
author = {Kyle Lawson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1006.0899},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
Proceedings of the 2010 Lake Louise Winter Institute, 3 pages. Title changed to avoid confusion with preprint arXiv:1011.3288v1