Narrow Results

Assuming that cosmic rays entering the Earth's atmosphere contain a small admixture of nuggets of strange quark matter in form of strangelets one can explain a number of apparently "strange" effects observed in different cosmic rays experiments. We shall demonstrate here that the mass spectrum of such strangelets fills the "nuclear desert" gap existing between the heaviest elements observed in Universe and the next "nuclear-like objects" represented by neutron and strange stars.

The color-flavor locked (CFL) phase of strangelets is investigated in a quark mass density-dependent model. Parameters are determined by stability arguments. It is concluded that three solutions to the system equations can be found, corresponding, respectively, to positively charged, negatively charged, and nearly neutral CFL strangelets. The charge to baryon number of the positively charged strangelets is smaller than the previous result, while the charge of the negatively charged strangelets is nearly proportional in magnitude to the cubic-root of the baryon number. However, the positively charged strangelets are more stable compared to the other two solutions.

The main properties of magnetized strangelets, namely, their energy per baryon, radius and electric charge, are studied in the unpaired strange quark matter phase. Temperature effects are taken into account in order to study their stability compared to the ⁵⁶Fe isotope and non-magnetized strangelets within the framework of the MIT bag model. It is concluded that the presence of a magnetic field tends to stabilize more the strangelets, even when temperature is considered. We find that the electric charge is modified in the presence of the magnetic field, leading to higher charge values for magnetized strangelets, when compared to the non-magnetized case.

The properties of color–flavor locked (CFL) strangelets are investigated with the latest quark mass scaling that includes both linear confinement and leading-order perturbative interactions. With a self-consistent thermodynamics, we find that the perturbative interaction increases CFL strangelets’ radius and energy per baryon, while the one-gluon-exchange interaction has the opposite effects. With the increasing of the baryon number $A$, the energy per baryon decreases the electric charge per baryon and approaches to zero eventually. Specially at comparatively large $A$, the electric charge is nearly proportional to the two-third power of $A$ with the proportional coefficient to be about half of that in the conventional bag model.

Strange quark matter, a (still) hypothetical absolutely stable form of cold quark matter with high strangeness content has been investigated for many years, in both its "normal" and paired versions. Chunks of this matter (strangelets) would be ejected in astrophysical events and later reprocessed by collisions with ordinary nuclei in space. We analyze the latter processes, including abrasion, fusion and fission of the original strangelets to understand the physics of these interactions both in the interstellar medium and in the earth's atmosphere. We include finite temperature effects to calculate radii, electric charges and energies for the strangelets with the aim of helping ground-based and space experiments and make comparisons with anomalous cosmic primaries reported in the literature.

The searches for classical Magnetic Monopoles (MMs) at accelerators, for GUT Super-heavy MMs in the penetrating cosmic radiation and for Intermediate Mass MMs at high altitudes are discussed. The status of the search for other massive exotic particles such as nuclearites and Q-balls is briefly reviewed.