The Mysterious Bursts observed by Telescope Array and Axion Quark Nuggets

TL;DR

This paper suggests that the mysterious bursts observed by the Telescope Array are caused by dark matter annihilation events within axion quark nuggets, linking cosmic dark matter phenomena with atmospheric air shower observations.

Contribution

It proposes a novel explanation connecting AQN dark matter model to observed air shower bursts and supports this with matching observational features.

Findings

Bursts correlate with lightning and match AQN emission features.

Proposes reanalysis of data with increased cutoff time scale.

Suggests detecting radio signals synchronized with bursts.

Abstract

Telescope Array (TA) experiment has recorded \cite{Abbasi:2017rvx,Okuda_2019} several short time bursts of air shower like events. These bursts are very distinct from conventional single showers, and are found to be strongly correlated with lightnings. We propose that these bursts represent the direct manifestation of the dark matter annihilation events within the so-called axion quark nugget (AQN) model, which was originally invented for completely different purpose to explain the observed similarity between the dark and the visible components in the Universe, i.e. $\Omega_{\rm DM}\sim \Omega_{\rm visible}$ without any fitting parameters. We support this proposal by demonstrating that the observations \cite{Abbasi:2017rvx,Okuda_2019}, including the frequency of appearance, temporal and spatial distributions, intensity, and other related observables are nicely match the emission features of the AQNs propagating in the atmosphere under thunderstorm. We propose to test these ideas by reanalyzing the existing data by increasing the cutoff time scale $\Delta t=1$ ms for the bursts. We also suggest to test this proposal by analyzing the correlations with proper infrasound and seismic instruments. We also suggest to search for the radio signal with frequency $\nu\in (3-300)$ MHz which must be synchronized with bursts.