The ANITA Anomalous Events and Axion Quark Nuggets
Abstract
The Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna (\textsc{ANITA}) collaboration [1-3] has reported two anomalous events with noninverted polarity. These events are hard to explain in terms of conventional cosmic rays (CRs). We explore a new possible explanation for these anomalous events by suggesting that these events can be related to the dark matter (DM) annihilations within the so-called axion quark nugget (AQN) DM model. This model was initially invented for a completely different purpose to explain the observed similarity between the dark and the visible components in the Universe, i.e. without any fitting parameters. We investigate the signal properties of the upward-going AQN events, including the event rate, the pulse duration, and the electric field strength, and find them consistent with the observations. We list several features of the upward-going AQN events distinct from conventional CR air showers. The observations (or nonobservation) of these features may substantiate (or refute) our proposal.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2105.01668,
title = {The ANITA Anomalous Events and Axion Quark Nuggets},
author = {Xunyu Liang and Ariel Zhitnitsky},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.01668},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Final version to appear in Phys Rev. D. New additional comments, including Pierre Auger constraint on upward going showers