Related papers: Magnetic monopoles, nuclearites, Q-balls: a qualit…
Astrophysical bounds on the properties and abundances of primordial quark nuggets and cosmic ray strangelets are reviewed. New experiments to search for cosmic ray strangelets in lunar soil and from the International Space Station are…
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 Standard Model (SM) of the microcosm provides an excellent description of the phenomena of the microcosm, with the triumph of the discovery of the Higgs boson. There are many reasons, however, to believe that the SM is incomplete and…
The searches for classical Magnetic Monopoles (MMs) at accelerators, for GUT Superheavy MMs in the penetrating cosmic radiation and for Intermediate Mass MMs at high altitudes are discussed. The status of the search for other massive exotic…
The SLIM experiment at the Chacaltaya high altitude laboratory was sensitive to nuclearites and Q-balls, which could be present in the cosmic radiation as possible Dark Matter components. It was sensitive also to strangelets, i.e. small…
Magnetic monopoles and Q-balls are examples of topological and nontopological solitons, respectively. A new soliton state with both topological and nontopological charges is shown to also exist, given a monopole sector with a portal…
The gauge-mediated model of supersymmetry breaking implies that stable non-topological solitons, Q-balls, could form in the early universe and comprise the dark matter. It is shown that the inclusion of the effects from gravity-mediation…
There may exist extended configurations in the dark matter sector that are analogues of structures in the visible sector. In this work, we explore non-topological solitonic configurations, specifically Q-balls, and study when they may form…
Quark nuggets are theoretical objects composed of approximately equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks and are also called strangelets and nuclearites. They have been proposed as a candidate for dark matter, which constitutes about…
We discuss the experimental situation of direct searches at accelerators for Dirac magnetic monopoles, and in the penetrating cosmic radiation for the superheavy magnetic monopoles predicted by GUT theories. We also discuss the searches for…
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…
Gauge-mediated models of supersymmetry-breaking imply that stable Q-balls can form in the early universe and act as dark matter. All stable Q-balls in the MSSM are associated with one or more flat directions. We show that while Q-balls are…
Supersymmetry implies that stable non-topological solitons, Q-balls, could form in the early universe and could make up all or part of dark matter. We show that the relic Q-balls passing through Earth can produce a detectable neutrino flux.…
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…
We report on the search for Strange Quark Matter (SQM) and charged Q-balls with the SLIM experiment at the Chacaltaya High Altitude Laboratory (5230 m a.s.l.) from 2001 to 2005. The SLIM experiment was a 427 m$^{2}$ array of Nuclear Track…
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…
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…
Supersymmetric extensions of the standard model predict the existence of non-topological solitons, $Q$-balls. Assuming the standard cosmological history preceded by inflation, $Q$-balls can form in the early universe and can make up the…
Supersymmetric extensions of the standard model generically contain stable non-topological solitons, Q-balls, which carry baryon or lepton number. We show that large Q-balls can be copiously produced in the early universe, can survive until…
Though widely accepted, it is not proven that supermassive compact objects (SMCOs) residing in galactic centers are black holes. In particular, the Milky Way's SMCO can be a giant nontopological soliton, Q-ball, made of a scalar field: this…