The ANITA Anomalous Events and Axion Quark Nuggets

Abstract

The Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna (\textsc{ANITA}) collaboration [1-3] has reported two anomalous events with noninverted polarity. These events are hard to explain in terms of conventional cosmic rays (CRs). We explore a new possible explanation for these anomalous events by suggesting that these events can be related to the dark matter (DM) annihilations within the so-called axion quark nugget (AQN) DM model. This model was initially invented for a completely different purpose to explain the observed similarity between the dark and the visible components in the Universe, i.e. ${\Omega }_{\mathrm{DM}}\sim {\Omega }_{\mathrm{visible}}$ without any fitting parameters. We investigate the signal properties of the upward-going AQN events, including the event rate, the pulse duration, and the electric field strength, and find them consistent with the observations. We list several features of the upward-going AQN events distinct from conventional CR air showers. The observations (or nonobservation) of these features may substantiate (or refute) our proposal.

Final version to appear in Phys Rev. D. New additional comments, including Pierre Auger constraint on upward going showers

References in corpus (11)

• Macro Dark Matter
• The Axion Quark Nugget Dark Matter Model: Size Distribution and Survival Pattern
• A Dark Matter Interpretation of the ANITA Anomalous Events
• Axion Quark Nuggets. Dark Matter and Matter-Antimatter asymmetry: theory, observations and future experiments
• The Mystery of the Cosmic Diffuse Ultraviolet Background Radiation
• Solar Extreme UV radiation and quark nugget dark matter model
• Can the ANITA anomalous events be due to new physics?
• The mysterious diffuse UV radiation and Axion Quark Nugget dark matter model
• Dark matter searches using accelerometer-based networks
• Photon emission from bare quark stars
• The Pierre Auger Exotic Events and Axion Quark Nuggets

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• The Glow of Axion Quark Nugget Dark Matter: (II) Galaxy Clusters
• Possibility of antiquark nuggets detection using meteor searching radars
• A search for the anomalous events detected by ANITA using the Pierre Auger Observatory
• IceCube and the origin of ANITA-IV events
• Ball Lightning as a profound manifestation of the Dark Matter physics
• Multi-Modal Clustering Events observed by Horizon-10T and Axion Quark Nuggets
• Further exploration of the machine-learning-based nuclear mass table