Lunar seismic search for strange quark matter

It was pointed out in 1984 by Witten that strange quark matter (SQM) – matter made of up, down, and strange quarks (rather than just up and down, as are protons and neutrons) – might well be stable and the lowest energy state of matter. The reason is that it would be electrically neutral and have le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAdvances in space research Vol. 37; no. 10; pp. 1889 - 1893
Main Authors Banerdt, W. Bruce, Chui, Talso, Herrin, Eugene T., Rosenbaum, Doris, Teplitz, Vigdor L.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Ltd 2006
Subjects
Moon
Seismic detection
Strange quark matter
Moon
Strange quark matter
Seismic detection
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Summary:It was pointed out in 1984 by Witten that strange quark matter (SQM) – matter made of up, down, and strange quarks (rather than just up and down, as are protons and neutrons) – might well be stable and the lowest energy state of matter. The reason is that it would be electrically neutral and have less Pauli-Principle repulsion. Binding would increase with numbers of quarks, and might not begin below thousands. It would have nuclear density. Neutron stars would be strange quark stars; and it might conceivably constitute dark matter. One way to detect ton-range SQM nuggets (SQNs) would be from seismic signals they would make passing through the Earth. We give a rough estimate on the relative advantage of attempting to detect SQNs on the Moon over Earth (about 50 times more detections).
ISSN:0273-1177
1879-1948
DOI:10.1016/j.asr.2005.06.034