The Electrosphere of Macroscopic "Quark Nuclei": A Source for Diffuse MeV Emissions from Dark Matter

TL;DR

This paper models the electrosphere of quark antimatter nuggets using a Thomas-Fermi approach, explaining diffuse MeV emissions and supporting their role as dark matter without relying on phenomenological parameters.

Contribution

It provides a self-consistent density profile of quark nuggets' electrosphere, linking microscopic structure to observed galactic emissions, thus validating the dark matter hypothesis.

Findings

Calculated electrosphere parameters match observational estimates.

The model explains diffuse MeV and 511 keV emissions from the Galaxy.

The structure applies to both dark matter nuggets and strange-quark stars.

Abstract

Using a Thomas-Fermi model, we calculate the structure of the electrosphere of the quark antimatter nuggets postulated to comprise much of the dark matter. This provides a single self-consistent density profile from ultrarelativistic densities to the nonrelativistic Boltzmann regime that use to present microscopically justified calculations of several properties of the nuggets, including their net charge, and the ratio of MeV to 511 keV emissions from electron annihilation. We find that the calculated parameters agree with previous phenomenological estimates based on the observational supposition that the nuggets are a source of several unexplained diffuse emissions from the Galaxy. As no phenomenological parameters are required to describe these observations, the calculation provides another nontrivial verification of the dark-matter proposal. The structure of the electrosphere is quite general and will also be valid at the surface of strange-quark stars, should they exist.