Dark Quark Nuggets

Understand

"Dark quark nuggets", a lump of dark quark matter, can be produced in the early universe for a wide range of confining gauge theories and serve as a macroscopic dark matter candidate.

• The two necessary conditions, a nonzero dark baryon number asymmetry and a first-order phase transition, can be easily satisfied for many asymmetric dark matter models and QCD-like gauge theories with a few massless flavors.
• For confinement scales from 10 keV to 100 TeV, these dark quark nuggets with a huge dark baryon number have their masses vary from $10^{23}~\mathrm{g}$ to $10^{-7}~\mathrm{g}$ and their radii from $10^{8}~\mathrm{cm}$ to $10^{-15}~\mathrm{cm}$.
• Such macroscopic dark matter candidates can be searched for by a broad scope of experiments and even new detection strategies.