Abstract
De Rújula and Glashow1 have suggested that nuclearites, aggregates of up, down and strange quarks in roughly equal proportions, may form a component of the material reaching the Earth from the Galaxy. On traversing the atmosphere they will look something like meteors, but will travel faster. The masses of these aggregates may vary over a wide range and their velocities will be typically 250 km s−1, corresponding to the Sun's galactic rotation. If all the dark matter in the Galaxy is assumed to be in the form of nuclearites, a limit can be set to the incoming flux. We report here upper limits derived from four experiments, originally carried out to detect cosmic γ rays, as well as some derived by other authors, which would be sensitive to pulses of light from nuclearites in the lower atmosphere. Our upper limits are compatible with the suggested maximum flux and competitive with a search for tracks etched in mica2, which could also be caused by nuclearites.
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Porter, N., Fegan, D., MacNeill, G. et al. A search for evidence of nuclearites in astrophysical pulse experiments. Nature 316, 49 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1038/316049a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/316049a0
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