Reviving quark nuggets as a candidate for dark matter

Abstract

We discuss a novel mechanism for segregation of baryons and anti-baryons in the quark-gluon plasma phase which can lead to formation of quark and antiquark nuggets in the early universe, irrespective of the order of the quark-hadron phase transition. This happens due to CP violating scattering of quarks and antiquarks from moving $Z(3)$ domain walls. CP violation here is spontaneous in nature and arises from the nontrivial profile of the background gauge field ($A_{0}$ ) between different $Z(3)$ vacua. We study the effect of this spontaneous CP violation on the baryon transport across the collapsing large $Z(3)$ domain walls (which can arise in the context of certain low energy scale inflationary models). Our results show that this CP violation can lead to large concentrations of baryons and anti-baryons in the early universe. The quark and antiquark nuggets, formed by this alternate mechanism, can provide a viable dark matter candidate within standard model without violating any observational constraints.