How Can Strange Quark Matter Occur Deeply in the Atmosphere?

Quark matter which contains s-quarks in addition to u- and d- could be stable or metastable. In this case, lumps made of this strange matter, called strangelets, could occasionally hit the Earth. When travelling through the atmosphere they would behave not dissimilar to usual high-velocity meteors with only exception that, eventually, strangelets reach the surface. As these encounters are expected to be extremely rare events, very large exposure is needed for their observatio...

The properties of finite lumps of strange quark matter (strangelets) with emphasis on the two scenarios of producing strange matter in relativistic heavy ion collisions are summarized. As an outlook, the possibility of short-lived strange composites and charmed matter are discussed for coming heavy ion experiments.

The properties of strange quark matter and strange hadronic matter and their finite counterparts (strangelets and MEMOs) are reviewed. The production of strange matter in heavy-ion collision and the appearance of strange matter in neutron stars are discussed.

Strangelets (hypothetical stable lumps of strange quarkmatter) of astrophysical origin may be ultimately detected in specific cosmic ray experiments. The initial mass distribution resulting from the possible astrophysical production sites would be subject to reprocessing in the interstellar medium and in the earth's atmosphere. In order to get a better understanding of the claims for the detection of this still hypothetic state of hadronic matter, we present a study of strang...

The conjecture of Bodmer-Witten-Terazawa suggesting a form of quark matter (Strange Quark Matter) as the ground state of hadronic interactions has been studied in laboratory and astrophysical contexts by a large number of authors. If strange stars exist, some violent events involving these compact objects, such as mergers and even their formation process, might eject some strange matter into the interstellar medium that could be detected as a trace signal in the cosmic ray fl...

The properties of strangelets are reviewed and two experiments searching for them in cosmic rays are described. The prospects for strangelets as ultra-high energy cosmic rays beyond the classical GZK-cutoff are discussed.

Strangelets (stable lumps of quark matter) can have masses and charges much higher than those of nuclei, but have very low charge-to-mass ratios. This is confirmed in a relativistic Thomas-Fermi model. The high charge allows astrophysical strangelet acceleration to energies orders of magnitude higher than for protons. In addition, strangelets are much less susceptible to the interactions with the cosmic microwave background that suppress the flux of cosmic ray protons and nuc...

We argue that ultrahigh energy cosmic ray collisions in the Earth atmosphere can probe the strange quark density of the nucleon. These collisions have center-of-mass energies \agt 10^{4.6} A GeV, where A \geq 14 is the nuclear baryon number. We hypothesize the formation of a deconfined thermal fireball which undergoes a sudden hadronization. At production the fireball has a very high matter density and consists of gluons and two flavors of light quarks (u,d). Because the fire...

I describe a dark matter candidate based in qcd physics in which the dark matter is composed of macroscopically large "nuggets" of quark and anti-quark matter. These objects may have a sufficiently massive low number density to avoid constraints from direct detection searches. Though not "baryonic" in the conventional sense quark matter is strongly interacting and will produce a clear signal in ground based detectors. As the prospects of detecting these objects are mainly lim...

A description of strange quark matter at finite temperature is given, with emphasis on the inclusion of finite size effects. For massless quarks all thermodynamic quantities can be evaluated analytically, while the case of massive quarks must be treated numerically. The resulting model is applied to the phase equilibrium between strange hadronic matter and strangelets, and some preliminary results are given.