Related papers: Strangelets, Nuclearites, Q-balls--A Brief Overvie…
In these lecture notes, the role of strangeness in relativistic astrophysics of compact stars is addressed. The appearance of strange particles, as hyperons, kaons, and strange quarks, in the core of compact stars is examined and common…
The abundance and size distribution of quark nuggets (QN), formed a few microseconds after the big bang due to first order QCD phase transition in the early universe, has been estimated. It appears that stable QNs could be a viable…
Ever since the discovery of neutron stars it has been realized that they serve as probes of a physical regime that cannot be accessed in laboratories: strongly degenerate matter at several times nuclear saturation density. Existing nuclear…
Matter consisting of up, down and strange quarks, socalled Strange Quark Matter, has been hypothesized to be stable in bulk, and conceivably stable or metastable in finite systems---strangelets---as an alternative state to ordinary baryonic…
MSSM predicts 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 result in a copious production of stable…
We review the prospects for probing new physics with neutrino astrophysics. High energy neutrinos provide an important means of accessing physics beyond the electroweak scale. Neutrinos have a number of advantages over conventional…
Strangelets with non-zero entropy are studied within the MIT bag model. Explicit account is taken of the constraints that strangelets must be color neutral and have a fixed total momentum. In general, masses increase with increasing entropy…
Using the quark mass density- and temperature dependent model, we have studied the thermodynamical properties and the stability of strangelet at finite temperature. The temperature, charge and strangeness dependences on the stability of…
The conjecture of Bodmer-Witten-Terazawa suggesting a form of quark matter (Strange Quark Matter) as the ground state of hadronic interactions has been studied in laboratory and astrophysical contexts by a large number of authors. If…
There has never been a more exciting time in the overlapping areas of nuclear physics, particle physics and relativistic astrophysics than today. Orbiting observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE),…
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 hypothesis that strange quark matter may be the true ground state of matter at extremely high densities, strange quark stars should be stable and could exist in the Universe. It is possible that pulsars may actually be…
Theories with low-energy supersymmetry predict the existence of stable non-topological solitons, Q-balls, that can contribute to dark matter. We discuss the experimental signatures, methods of detection, and the present limits on such dark…
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,…
Several experiments (e.g., Milagro and IceCube) have reported the presence in the sky of regions with significant excess in the arrival direction distributions of Galactic cosmic rays in the TeV to PeV energy range. Here we study the…
The potential of decays of mesons containing heavy quarks [including $B$ mesons and the $\Upsilon(1S)$] for producing final states of matter with unusual quark configurations, such as $q q \bar q \bar q$ or $q q q q \bar q$, is…
Stable baryonic Q-balls, which appear in supersymmetric extensions of the Standard Model, could form at the end of cosmological inflation from fragmentation of the Affleck-Dine condensate. They can be dark matter. The existing bounds rely…
A critical discussion of our knowledge about extragalactic cosmic rays and magnetic fields is attempted. What do we know for sure? What are our prejudices? How do we confront our models with the observations? How can we assess the…
A constraint between thermal fireball parameters arises from the requirement that the balance of strangeness in a fireball is (nearly) zero. We study the impact of this constraint on (multi-)strange (anti-)baryon multiplicities and compare…
The study of high energy cosmic rays is a diversified field of observational and phenomenological physics addressing questions ranging from shock acceleration of charged particles in various astrophysical objects, via transport properties…