"Cosmic Rays" from Quark Matter

TL;DR

This paper proposes a dark matter candidate composed of large quark-antiquark nuggets, which could be detected via air showers similar to ultrahigh energy cosmic rays, offering a novel detection method.

Contribution

It introduces a new dark matter model based on quark matter nuggets and analyzes their potential detectability through atmospheric air showers.

Findings

Quark nuggets can produce detectable air showers.

These showers resemble those from ultrahigh energy cosmic rays.

Large-scale cosmic ray detectors are promising for detection.

Abstract

I describe a dark matter candidate based in qcd physics in which the dark matter is composed of macroscopically large "nuggets" of quark and anti-quark matter. These objects may have a sufficiently massive low number density to avoid constraints from direct detection searches. Though not "baryonic" in the conventional sense quark matter is strongly interacting and will produce a clear signal in ground based detectors. As the prospects of detecting these objects are mainly limited by the detector cross-section large scale cosmic ray detectors are a promising search platform. To this end I describe the basic properties of the air shower induced by the passage of a quark nugget through the earth's atmosphere. It will be shown that this shower is similar in several important ways to the shower induced by a single ultrahigh energy cosmic ray.