Related papers: Are there strangelets in cosmic rays?
Energetic particles, traditionally called Cosmic Rays, were discovered nearly a hundred years ago, and their origin is still uncertain. Their main constituents are the normal nuclei as in the standard cosmic abundances of matter, with some…
The main purpose of this work is to find the causes of the break of the cosmic ray spectrum at an energy of 3 PeV, which is called the knee. The solution of the problem is associated with the determination of the nuclear composition of…
Relativistic heavy ion collisions offer the possibility to produce exotic metastable states of nuclear matter containing (roughly) equal number of strangeness compared to the content in baryon number. The reasoning of both their stability…
I provide a short review of the current status of indirect dark matter searches with gamma rays, charged cosmic rays and neutrinos. For each case I will focus on various excesses reported in the literature which have been interpreted as…
If the dark matter of our galaxy is composed of nuggets of quarks or antiquarks in a colour superconducting phase there will be a small but non-zero flux of these objects through the Earth's atmosphere. A nugget of quark matter will deposit…
In this contribution the role of strangeness in astrophysics is discussed and, more precisely, strange hadronic matter in the interior of neutron stars. A special attention is payed to certain phenomena involving strange hadronic matter,…
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…
We speculate on some novel consequences possibly associated with a change of elementary particle constants with time. These concern the question as to whether particles reaching the earth from distant parts of the universe reflect their…
Cosmic rays are often modeled as charged particles. This allows their non-ballistic propagation in magnetized structures to be captured. In certain situations, a neutral cosmic ray component can arise. For example, cosmic ray neutrons are…
After a century of observations, we still do not know the origin of cosmic rays. I will review the current state of cosmic ray observations at the highest energies, and their implications for proposed acceleration models and secondary…
In this conference proceeding, we review important theoretical developments related to the production of strangeness in astrophysics. This includes its effects in supernova explosions, neutron stars, and compact-star mergers. We also…
Low-baryon number lumps of strange quark matter, strangelets, are presently searched for in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion experiments at CERN and Brookhaven. This paper gives an overview of the physical properties of strangelets with…
The existence of cosmic rays of energies exceeding 10^20 eV is one of the mysteries of high energy astrophysics. The spectrum and the high energy to which it extends rule out almost all suggested source models. The challenges posed by…
Two of the greatest mysteries of modern physics are the origin of the dark matter in the universe and the nature of the highest energy particles in the cosmic ray spectrum. We discuss here possible direct and indirect connections between…
Since more than a century we investigate cosmic particles coming from the Universe with the aim of understanding their nature, their origin and how they are accelerated. So far, cosmic rays have provided many impressive results, giving…
Cosmic rays are the most outstanding example of accelerated particles. They are about 1\% of the total mass of the Universe, so that cosmic rays would represent by far the most important energy transformation process of the Universe.…
We review the physics of the highest energy cosmic rays. The discovery of their sources, still unknown, will reveal the most energetic astrophysical objects in the universe and could unveil new physics beyond the standard model of particle…
The observation of twenty cosmic-ray air-showers at and above 10^{20} eV poses fascinating problems for particle astrophysics: how the primary particles are accelerated to these energies, how the primaries get here through the 2.7K…
Strange quark matter (SQM) is considered a possible true ground state of QCD at high densities. This idea motivates research on exotic compact objects and certain cosmic-ray phenomena. For instance, the remnant HESS J1731-347 contains a…
A short discussion is provided on the hypothesis of strange quark dust of low specific charge in the terrestrial magnetosphere. We suggest by means of rough estimates the possible existence of a strangelet belt in the magnetosphere.