Manifestation of antiquark nuggets in collisions with the Earth

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential detectability of antiquark nuggets, a dark matter candidate, by analyzing their interactions with Earth and the Sun, constraining their properties based on observational data and seismic non-detections.

Contribution

It identifies the allowed parameter space for antiquark nuggets' baryon number and interaction probability consistent with observational constraints.

Findings

Allowed antibaryon charge number range: 2×10^{24} to 8×10^{25}

Interaction probability constrained between 0.1 and 0.25

Large antibaryon charges above 10^{33} conflict with Earth's seismic non-observations

Abstract

Antiquark nuggets are hypothetical compact composite objects conjectured to account for a significant fraction of dark matter in the Universe. In contrast to quark nuggets, these objects consist of antimatter. They may remain undetected if they possess a sufficiently small cross section relative to their mass. In this paper, we investigate the allowed region in the parameter space of this model that is consistent with the observed neutrino flux from the Sun and the Earth, and the non-observation of seismic events with specific signatures of dark matter particles. We found the allowed values of the antibaryon charge number in this model to be in the interval $2\times 10^{24}<A<8\times 10^{25}$, while the probability of nucleon annihilation upon collisions with the antiquark core is constrained by $0.1\lesssim \kappa<0.25$. Although very large values of the antibaryon charge, $A>10^{33}$, are not fully excluded by the present study, we show that they conflict with the non-observation of rare catastrophic explosion-like events on the Earth.