Abstract
We advocate the idea that Axion Quark Nuggets (AQN) hitting the Earth can be detected by analysing the infrasound, acoustic, and seismic waves which always accompany their passage in the atmosphere and underground. Our estimates for the infrasonic frequency ν≃5 Hz and overpressure δp∼0.3 Pa for relatively large size dark matter (DM) nuggets suggest that sensitivity of presently available instruments is already sufficient to detect very intense (but very rare) events today with existing technology. A study of much more frequent but less intense events requires a new type of instrument. We propose a detection strategy for a systematic study to search for such relatively weak and frequent events by using distributed acoustic sensing and briefly mention other possible detection methods.
Highlights
Introduction and MotivationThe main goal of the present work is to present a new method to detect axion quark nuggets (AQN) propagating in the Earth’s atmosphere and underground.The AQN dark matter model [1] was introduced decades ago to explain the observed similarity between the densities of dark and visible matter in the Universe, i.e., ΩDM ∼ Ωvisible
We introduce an unknown parameter ξ ↓ which applies to the underground case to account for the complicated physics which describes the transfer of the AQN energy into the the surrounding material energy denoted as Eblast
As a result we introduce into our AQN estimates empirical parameters ξ ↓ and η which are very hard to compute from the first principles, but could be fixed by future observations
Summary
The main goal of the present work is to present a new method to detect axion quark nuggets (AQN) propagating in the Earth’s atmosphere and underground. In the models [2–5], the presence of strange quarks stabilizes the quark matter at sufficiently high densities, allowing strangelets formed in the early universe to remain stable over cosmological timescales This type of DM is “cosmologically dark” not because of the weakness of the AQN interactions, but due to their small cross-section-to-mass ratio, which scales down many observable consequences of an otherwise strongly-interacting DM candidate. The corresponding emission of photons in dilute environments such as the galactic center and at the locations of high-altitude Earth orbits can be studied and properly analyzed because the mean free path in such dilute environments is long This should be contrasted with the case of dense environments where the annihilation events occur in the.
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