English

Mass distribution of magnetized quark-nugget dark matter and comparison with observations

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2020-10-22 v3 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

Quark nuggets are a candidate for dark matter consistent with the Standard Model. Previous models of quark nuggets have investigated properties arising from their being composed of strange, up, and down quarks and have not included any effects caused by their self-magnetic field. However, Tatsumi found that the core of a magnetar star may be a quark nugget in a ferromagnetic state with core magnetic field B between 101110^{ 11} T and 101310^{ 13} T. We apply Tatsumi's result to quark-nugget dark-matter and report results on aggregation of magnetized quark nuggets (MQNs) after formation from the quark-gluon plasma until expansion of the universe freezes out the mass distribution to include 102410^{ -24} kg to 101410^{ 14} kg. Aggregation overcomes weak-interaction decay. Computed mass distributions show MQNs are consistent with requirements for dark matter and indicate that geologic detectors (craters in peat bogs) and space-based detectors (satellites measuring radio-frequency emissions after passage through normal matter) should be able to detect MQN dark matter. Null and positive observations narrow the range of a key parameter B to between 101110^{ 11} T and 3 101310^{ 13} T.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.12272,
  title  = {Mass distribution of magnetized quark-nugget dark matter and comparison with observations},
  author = {J. Pace VanDevender and Ian Shoemaker and T. Sloan and Aaron P. VanDevender and Benjamin A. Ulmen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.12272},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

30 pages including 2 page supplement, 6 figures, 1 table, 51 references. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy-edit version of an article published in Scientific Reports as Mass distribution of magnetized quark-nugget dark matter and comparison with requirements and observations. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-74984-z