Related papers: Strangelets, Nuclearites, Q-balls--A Brief Overvie…
Supersymmetric models predict a natural dark-matter candidate, stable baryonic Q-balls. They could be copiously produced in the early Universe as a by-product of the Affleck-Dine baryogenesis. I review the cosmological and astrophysical…
Strange quark matter in a color-flavor locked state is significantly more bound than ``ordinary'' strange quark matter. This increases the likelihood of strangelet metastability or even absolute stability. Properties of color-flavor locked…
It has been over 30 years since the first suggestion that the true ground state of cold hadronic matter might be not nuclear matter but rather strange quark matter (SQM). Ever since, searches for stable SQM have been proceeding in various…
Macroscopic dark matter with dominating strong interactions, supposed to be composites, represents an alternative to the most popular WIMP particles. Predicted in various models as strangelets, nuclearites, nuggets, having different…
A description of strange quark matter at finite temperature is given, with emphasis on the inclusion of finite size effects. For massless quarks all thermodynamic quantities can be evaluated analytically, while the case of massive quarks…
Quark matter both in terrestrial experiment and in astrophysics is briefly reviewed. Astrophysical quark matter could appear in the early Universe, in compact stars, and as cosmic rays. Emphasis is put on quark star as the nature of…
The conjecture that ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are actually strangelets is discussed. Besides the reason that strangelets can do as cosmic rays beyond the GZK-cutoff, another argument to support the conjecture is addressed in…
The Searches for classical Dirac Magnetic Monopoles (MMs) at accelerators, for GUT superheavy MMs in the penetrating cosmic radiation and for Intermediate Mass IMMs at high altitudes are discussed. Also the searches for nuclearites and…
The main properties of magnetized strangelets, namely, their energy per baryon, radius and electric charge, are studied. Temperature effects are also taken into account in order to study their stability compared to the 56Fe isotope and…
Motivated by some recent cosmic ray experiments we study the properties of strange quark matter near flavour equilibrium. Using Fermi-gas model we argue that, contrary to some claims, the geometrical radii of quark matter strangelets are…
This paper discusses several most intruigung astrophysical implications connected with the possible absolute stability of strange quark matter.This is followed by a discussion of two astrophysical signals that may point at the existence of…
This short review aims at giving a brief overview of the various states of matter that have been suggested to exist in the ultra-dense centers of neutron stars. Particular emphasis is put on the role of quark deconfinement in neutron stars…
Cosmological implications of neutrinos are reviewed. The following subjects are discussed at a different level of scrutiny: cosmological limits on neutrino mass, neutrinos and primordial nucleosynthesis, cosmological constraints on unstable…
If the surface tension of quark matter is low enough, quark matter is not self bound. At sufficiently low pressure and temperature, it will take the form of a crystal of positively charged strangelets in a neutralizing background of…
Some of the means through which the possible presence of nearly deconfined quarks in neutron stars can be detected by astrophysical observations of neutron stars from their birth to old age are highlighted.
Motivated by the renewed interest in the role of Q-balls in cosmological evolution, we present a discussion of the main properties of Q-balls, including some new results.
This paper gives an overview of the properties of all possible equilibrium sequences of compact strange-matter stars with nuclear crusts, which range from strange stars to strange dwarfs. In contrast to their non-strange counterparts,…
Supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of Q-balls, some of which can be entirely stable. Both stable and unstable Q-balls can play an important role in cosmology. In particular, Affleck-Dine baryogenesis can…
Q-balls are generically present in models with softly broken low-energy supersymmetry. We discuss the properties of these non-topological solitons, which can precipitate a new kind of first-order phase transition in the early Universe and…
The fact that strange sea quarks are abundant in the nucleons, but with zero net strangeness, is of great importance for understanding the nature of matter condensed by the strong interaction, particularly in the context of the ``gigantic…