Seeding baryonic dark matter

Abstract

It has been proposed that primordial quark pellets or PQPs --ultra-dense quark-matter mini- stars-- formed at $T\sim 1$ GeV may be a good candidate accounting for the dark matter of the universe. If correct, dark matter would consist of very compact objects with a maximum mass of $10^{-2}{M}_{\odot }$ and radii of approximately 100 m, although smaller objects would be much more abundant and encompass the bulk of the dark matter content. Here we describe a viable formation mechanism based on the enhancement of the local baryon density when supra-horizon Peccei-Quinn domain walls formed at an earlier epoch sweep and accumulate quarks and gluons before entering the horizon. Assuming an efficient baryon concentration by contracting Peccei-Quinn domain walls, we derive the resulting primordial quark pellet mass spectrum, minimum mass and cosmological abundance.

A section describing a viable microphysics model has been added to the original version in order to reinforce the viability of the proposal. Minor semantic changes included