Strangelets and the TeV-PeV cosmic-ray anisotropies

Abstract

Several experiments (e.g., Milagro and IceCube) have reported the presence in the sky of regions with significant excess in the arrival direction distributions of Galactic cosmic rays in the TeV to PeV energy range. Here we study the possibility that these hotspots are a manifestation of the peculiar nature of these cosmic rays, and of the presence of molecular clouds near the sources. We propose that stable quark matter lumps or so-called "strangelets" can be emitted in the course of the transition of a neutron star to a more compact astrophysical object. A fraction of these massive particles would lose their charge by spallation or electron capture in molecular clouds located in the immediate neighborhood of their source, and propagate rectilinearly without decaying further, hence inducing anisotropies of the order of the cloud size. With reasonable astrophysical assumptions regarding the neutron star transition rate, strangelet injection and neutralization rates, we can reproduce successfully the observed hotspot characteristics and their distribution in the sky.

5 pages, 1 figure, submitted to PRL

References in corpus (10)

• Anisotropy and Corotation of Galactic Cosmic Rays
• Discovery of Localized Regions of Excess 10-TeV Cosmic Rays
• The Large Scale Cosmic-Ray Anisotropy as Observed with Milagro
• The Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory CO Mapping Survey of the Taurus Molecular Cloud
• Strangelet propagation and cosmic ray flux
• The puzzling MILAGRO hot spots
• The Milagro anticenter hot spots: cosmic rays from the Geminga supernova ?
• Ultrahigh energy cosmic ray acceleration in newly born magnetars and their associated gravitational wave signatures
• Short GRBs and dark matter seeding in neutron stars
• Strangelets accelerated by pulsars in galactic cosmic rays

Cited by in corpus (17)

• The origin of Galactic cosmic rays: challenges to the standard paradigm
• Origin of Small-Scale Anisotropies in Galactic Cosmic Rays
• Anomalous Anisotropies of Cosmic Rays from Turbulent Magnetic Fields
• Constraining decaying dark matter with neutron stars
• Dark matter and bubble nucleation in old neutron stars
• A New Maximum-Likelihood Technique for Reconstructing Cosmic-Ray Anisotropy at All Angular Scales
• The problem of small angular scale structure in the cosmic ray anisotropy data
• Explaining TeV Cosmic-Ray Anisotropies with Non-Diffusive Cosmic-Ray Propagation
• Pulsar scintillation patterns and strangelets
• Anisotropy in Cosmic rays from internal transitions in neutron stars
• No longer ballistic, not yet diffusive--the formation of cosmic ray small-scale anisotropies
• Radiation from cold molecular clouds and Sun chromosphere produced by anti-quark nugget dark matter
• Neutrino signals from Neutron Star implosions to Black Holes
• Cosmic Ray transport in mixed magnetic fields and their role on the observed anisotropies
• Deconfinement of quark content in neutron stars due to cosmic external agents
• Chaotic Behavior of Trapped Cosmic Rays
• A search for small and medium scale anisotropy of cosmic rays above 1 PeV registered at the Tunka-133 array