Revisiting Q-ball Interactions with Matters

TL;DR

This paper reevaluates the interactions between Q-ball dark matter and ordinary matter, focusing on scattering processes, energy costs, and charge accumulation, which are crucial for direct detection strategies.

Contribution

It provides a revised analysis of quark-Q-ball scattering considering energy costs and electromagnetic charge effects, refining previous conjectures.

Findings

Quark reflection as anti-quarks is suppressed due to energy costs.

Q-balls can acquire electromagnetic charge through scattering processes.

The revised scattering model impacts direct detection prospects.

Abstract

Q-ball dark matter is one of the candidates for the macroscopic dark matter: Q-ball is a non-topological solitonic configuration, whose stability can be ensured by global charge and energy conservation. One of the crucial factors for discovering signatures from the Q-ball dark matter, is the interactions of the Q-ball dark matter with ordinary matter. In particular, the scattering of ordinary matter off the Q-ball dark matter is important for the direct detection searches, such as paleo-detectors. It was conjectured that quarks incident on the Q-ball were reflected as anti-quarks with a probability of order unity, but it costs the energy of the squark in the Q-ball, which cannot be paid in the scattering of ordinary matter off the Q-ball dark matter. In addition, once a proton is reflected as an anti-proton, the Q-ball obtains the electromagnetic charge. In this study, we revisit the scattering process of quarks with the Q-ball with taking into account the energy cost of the scattering and the electromagnetic charge-up of the Q-ball.