Related papers: Stable quark matter in cosmic rays?
According to quantum chromodynamics, matter at ultra-high density and low temperature is a quark liquid, with a condensate of Cooper pairs of quarks near the Fermi surface ("color superconductivity"). This paper reviews the physics of color…
Droplets of absolutely stable strange quark matter (strangelets) immersed in a lepton background may be the energetically preferred composition of strange star crusts and of the interior of a new class of stars known as strangelet dwarfs.…
According to the strange quark matter hypothesis, strange planets may exist, which are planetary mass objects composed of almost equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks. A strange planet can revolve around its host strange star in a…
Laboratory experiments to explore plasma conditions and stimulated particle acceleration can illuminate aspects of the cosmic particle acceleration process. Here we discuss the cosmic-ray candidate source object variety, and what has been…
This is an introductory review about the on-going search for a signal of Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV) in cosmic rays. We first summarise basic aspects of cosmic rays, focusing on rays of ultra high energy (UHECRs). We discuss the…
Special relativity has been tested at low energy with great accuracy, but its extrapolation to very high-energy phenomena is much less well established. Introducing a critical distance scale, a , below 10E-25 cm (the wavelength scale of the…
Cosmological time crystals are created when a scalar field moves periodically through phase space in a spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime due to the presence of a limit cycle. All such cosmological time crystals in the…
In light of recent observations of an anomalous excess of high-energy positrons and electrons by the PAMELA and Fermi LAT experiments, we investigate exotic cosmic-ray signatures in scenarios with unstable dark matter that decays with an…
We discuss the possible appearance of strange exotic multi-quark states in the interior of neutron stars and signals for the existence of strange quark matter in the core of compact stars. We show how the in-medium properties of possible…
The understanding of the nature of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is one of the most intriguing open questions for current and future observatories. These particles are expected to be accelerated in extragalactic sources. Because of their…
We investigate, at both zero and finite temperature, the properties of strangelets versus the electric charge Z and strangeness S. The strangelet radius is not a monotonic function of either charge or strangeness, and a minimum is reached…
Since the true ground state of the hadrons may be strange quark matter (SQM), pulsars may actually be strange stars rather than neutron stars. According to this SQM hypothesis, strange planets can also stably exist. The density of normal…
In order to actually see the hadron-quark transition happening in a neutron star, we point out and study two static conditions (the transition hadronic density must be lower than the neutron star maximum hadronic density; the neutron star…
We propose a model of clustered u-d-s quark matter that leads to stable bulk strange quark matter. We discuss qualitatively consequences of impacts by sub-planetary mass strangelets on rocky solar system bodies.
Strange quark matter could be found in the core of neutron stars or forming strange quark stars. As is well known, these astrophysical objects are endowed with strong magnetic fields which affect the microscopic properties of matter and…
The possible existence of compact stars made of absolutely stable strange quark matter--referred to as strange stars--was pointed out by E. Witten almost a quarter of a century ago. One of the most amazing features of such objects concerns…
A calculation based on flat spacetime symmetries shows how there can be two quantum phases. For one, extreme phase change determines a conventional classical trajectory and four-momentum, i.e. mass times four-velocity. The other phase…
Compact stars consisting of massless quark matter and fermionic dark matter are studied by solving the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations for two fluids separately. Dark matter is further investigated by incorporating inter-fermionic…
A number of seemingly {\it exotic} phenomena seen in the highest cosmic-ray experiments are briefly discussed. We argue that they indicate existence of non-statistical fluctuations and strong correlations in the fragmentation region of…
In this thesis is studied three of the fundamental properties of clusters of matter made of quarks u, d and s called strangelets: the energy per baryon, the radius and the electric charge, all in the presence of intense magnetic fields and…