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Center for Astrophysics Research and Technologies Seminar Series Information

 

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Detection of magnetized quark-nugget candidate for dark matter

Thursday April 27, 2017
2:00 pm


 Presenter:  Pace VanDevender, SNL
 Series:  Center for Astrophysics Research and Technologies Seminar Series
 Abstract:  Quark nuggets are also called strangelets, and nuclearites and are theoretical objects composed of approximately equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks. They have been proposed as a candidate for dark matter, which constitutes ~84% of the universe's mass. Its nature has been a mystery for decades. Previous efforts to detect quark nuggets assumed that the nuclear-density core interacts directly with the surrounding matter so the stopping power is minimal. In contrast, we find that the large magnetic field of quark nuggets will produce a magnetopause with surrounding plasma, as the earth's magnetic field produces a magnetopause with the solar wind, and substantially increases the stopping power. We use the magnetopause model to compute the energy deposition on air, water, and earth as a function of quark-nugget mass, discuss the consequences for previous work, and show initial data that indicate instrumenting the Great Salt Lake in Utah USA can test the quark-nugget hypothesis for dark matter with mass > 0.001 kg.
 Location:  PAIS-2540, PAIS

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