Dark quark nuggets

Abstract

Dark quark nuggets", a lump of dark quark matter, can be produced in the early universe for a wide range of confining gauge theories and serve as a macroscopic dark matter candidate. The two necessary conditions, a nonzero dark baryon number asymmetry and a first-order phase transition, can be easily satisfied for many asymmetric dark matter models and QCD-like gauge theories with a few massless flavors. For confinement scales from 10 keV to 100 TeV, these dark quark nuggets with a huge dark baryon number have their masses vary from 10 23 g to 10 −7 g and their radii from 10 8 cm to 10 −15 cm. Such macroscopic dark matter candidates can be searched for by a broad scope of experiments and even new detection strategies. Specifically, we have found that the gravitational microlensing experiments can probe heavier dark quark nuggets or smaller confinement scales around 10 keV; collision of dark quark nuggets can generate detectable and transient electromagnetic radiation signals; the stochastic gravitational wave signals from the first order phase transition can be probed by the pulsar timing array observations and other space-based interferometry experiments; the approximately massless dark mesons can behave as dark radiation to be tested by the next-generation CMB experiments; the free dark baryons, as a subcomponent of dark matter, can have direct detection signals for a sufficiently strong interaction strength with the visible sector.

Dynamical axions and gravitational waves

“…(as also found in [35]), and for N F = 4, they are given by As a result of the spurion analysis described in the previous section, the masses of the X and the π mesons are no longer degenerate in N F = 4 case, although the thermal contributions to the spectrum remain degenerate. We show an example of a benchmark for the resulting thermal potential in the N F = 4 case in Fig.1.…”

“…Gravitational wave signals from confining phase transitions have recently been studied in dark QCD-like models with N F = 3 [34][35][36]. In this paper, we will focus on the relation between the dynamical axion and the gravitational wave signature of the chiral phase transition, for N F = 3 and N F = 4.…”

Resonant and scattering states in the α+α system from the nonlocalized cluster model

“…Extending the analysis to the up-right corner of the nuclide chart could be another working direction, where the medium-mass and heavy nuclei such as 104 Te and 212 Po are known to have rich cluster structures [86][87][88][89][90]. Recently, inspired by the non-localized cluster model, the quartetting wave function approach and the quartet model [91][92][93][94][95][96][97] are proposed to study α clustering in heavy nuclei such as 212 Po. It is tempted to study the nuclear reactions of medium-mass and heavy nuclei in a similar approach [98][99][100].…”

Electroweak symmetric dark matter balls

“…Using the steepest descent or saddle-point approximation to evaluate the integral in Eq. (89) [50,54], one gets the following approximate relation…”

“…For concreteness, we use g * = 108.75. The number of nucleation sites within a Hubble patch at t f is approximately given by [50,54]…”