Exploring detection of nuclearites in a large liquid scintillator neutrino detector

TL;DR

This paper assesses JUNO's potential to detect nuclearites, estimating their visible energy in a liquid scintillator and projecting sensitivities that surpass existing limits for certain mass and velocity ranges.

Contribution

It provides updated calculations of nuclearite detection sensitivity in JUNO, improving previous estimates and identifying the most stringent limits for specific nuclearite parameters.

Findings

JUNO can achieve sensitivities better than 7.7 x 10^{-17} cm^{-2} s^{-1} sr^{-1}

Projected sensitivities cover nuclearite masses from 10^{15} to 10^{24} GeV

JUNO offers the most stringent limits for downgoing nuclearites in a specific mass range

Abstract

We take the JUNO experiment as an example to explore nuclearites in the future large liquid scintillator detector. Comparing to the previous calculations, the visible energy of nuclearites across the liquid scintillator will be reestimated for the liquid scintillator based detector. Then the JUNO sensitivities to the nuclearite flux are presented. It is found that the JUNO projected sensitivities can be better than $7.7 \times 10^{-17} {\rm cm^{-2} s^{-1} sr^{-1}}$ for the nuclearite mass $10^{15} \; {\rm GeV} \leq M \leq 10^{24}$ GeV and initial velocity $10^{-4} \leq \beta_0 \leq 10^{-1}$ with a 20 year running. Note that the JUNO will give the most stringent limits for downgoing nuclearites with $1.6 \times 10^{13} \; {\rm GeV} \leq M \leq 4.0 \times 10^{15}$ GeV and a typical galactic velocity $\beta_0 = 10^{-3}$.