Related papers: Strangelets accelerated by pulsars in galactic cos…
Secondary photons and neutrinos produced in the interactions of cosmic ray protons emitted by distant Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) with the photon background along the line of sight can reveal a wealth of new information about the…
Members of the family of pulsar-like stars are distinguished by their different manifestations observed, i.e., radio pulsars, accretion-driven X-ray pulsars, X-ray bursts, anomalous X-ray pulsars/soft gamma-ray repeaters, compact center…
We investigate the stability of strange quark matter and the properties of the cor- responding strange stars, within a wide range of quark mass scaling. The calculation shows that the resulting maximum mass always lies between 1.5M_{sun}…
The absence of the expected GZK cutoff strongly challenges the notion that the highest-energy cosmic rays are of distant extragalactic origin. We discuss the possibility that these ultra-high-energy events originate in our Galaxy and…
The dispersion relation and damping rate of longitudinal color plasmons in finite strange quark matter (strangelets) are evaluated in the limits of weak coupling, low temperature, and long wavelength. The property of the QCD vacuum…
Cosmic rays are energetic charged particles from extraterrestrial sources, with the highest energy events thought to come from extragalactic sources. Their arrival is infrequent, so detection requires instruments with large collecting…
Gamma rays trace accelerated particles, and the observed flux of extragalactic gamma rays therefore constrains the global efficiency for particle acceleration. Extragalactic jets in active galactic nuclei can account for the gamma ray…
Forty years ago Witten suggested that dark matter could be composed of macroscopic clusters of strange quark matter. This idea was very popular for several years, but it dropped out of fashion once lattice QCD calculations indicated that…
The little we do know of the physical conditions in gamma-ray bursters makes them conducive to the acceleration of high-energy cosmic rays, especially if they are at cosmological distances. We find that, with the observed statistics and…
Neutron stars may harbour the true ground state of matter in the form of strange quark matter. If present, this type of matter is expected to be a color superconductor, a consequence of quark pairing with respect to the color/flavor degrees…
Several lines of evidence point to a relationship between gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and the high mass stars that explode as supernovae. Arguments that GRB sources accelerate cosmic rays (CRs) are summarized. High-energy neutrino detection…
The nonthermal radiation observed from a handfull of clusters of Galaxies is the proof that particle acceleration occurs in the intracluster medium. It is often believed that shock surfaces associated with either mergers of clusters of…
Motivated by recent suggestions that strange stars can be responsible for glitches and other observational features of pulsar, we review some possible equations of state and their implications for models of neutron, hybrid and strange…
The AMS-02 experiment confirms the excess of positrons in cosmic rays (CRs) for energy above 10 GeV with respect to the secondary production of positrons in the interstellar medium. This is interpreted as evidence of the existence of a…
The cosmic ray energy spectra of protons and helium nuclei, which are the most abundant components of cosmic radiation, exhibit a remarkable hardening at energies above one hundred GeV/nucleon. Recent data from AMS-02 confirms this feature…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and strangelets are two classes of "exotic" particles not yet discovered, and in agreement with theoretical scenarios most probably produced in different early stages of evolution of the…
The highest energy cosmic rays could be produced by drifts in magnetized, cylindrically collimated, sheared jets of powerful active galaxies (i.e. FR II radiogalaxies; radio loud quasars and high power BL Lacs). We show that in such…
This is a short survey of signatures and characteristics of the quark-gluon plasma in the light of experimental results that have been obtained over the past three decades. In particular, we present an in-depth discussion of the strangeness…
For a limited range of parameters, stable strange quark matter may be negatively charged in bulk due to one gluon exchange interactions. However, the reduction in strange quark occupation in the surface layer, which is responsible for…
The origin and composition of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) remain a mystery. The common lore is that UHECRs are deflected from their primary directions by the Galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields. Here we describe an…