Understand
Strongly-interacting matter in the form of nuggets of nuclear-density material are not currently excluded as dark matter candidates in the ten gram to hundred kiloton mass range.
- A recent variation on quark nugget dark matter models postulates that a first-order imbalance between matter and antimatter in the quark-gluon plasma prior to hadron production in the early universe binds up most of the dark matter into heavy (baryon number $B \sim 10^{25}$) anti-quark nuggets in the current epoch, explaining both the dark matter preponderance and the matter-antimatter asymmetry.
- Interactions of these massive objects with normal matter in the Earth and Sun will lead to annihilation and an associated neutrino flux in the $\sim 20-50$ MeV range.
- We calculate these fluxes for anti-quark nuggets of sufficient number density to account for the dark matter and find that current neutrino flux limits from Super-Kamiokande provide stringent constraints on several possible scenarios for such objects.