Unexplained Sets of Seismographic Station Reports and A Set Consistent with a Quark Nugget Passage

Abstract

In 1984 Edward Witten proposed that an extremely dense form of matter composed of up, down, and strange quarks may be stable at zero pressure (Witten, 1984). Massive nuggets of such dense matter, if they exist, may pass through the Earth and be detectable by the seismic signals they generate (de Rujula and Glashow, 1984). With this motivation we investigated over 1 million seismic data reports to the U.S. Geological Survey for the years 1990-1993 not associated with epicentral sources. We report two results: (1) with an average of about 0.16 unassociated reports per minute after data cuts, we found a significant excess over statistical expectation for sets with ten or more reports in ten minutes; and (2) in spite of a very small a priori probability from random reports, we found one set of reports with arrival times and other features appropriate to signals from an epilinear source. This event has the properties predicted for the passage of a nugget of strange quark matter (SQM) through the earth, although there is no direct confirmation from other phenomenologies.

23 pages, 9 figures, one previously described event eliminated, extensive examination of the second event as a possible association of random reports, additional analysis of the data set, search algorithms, and waveforms

References in corpus (2)

• Is RX J185635-375 a Quark Star?
• New Constraints on Neutron Star Cooling from Chandra Observations of 3C58

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• Detectable seismic consequences of the interaction of a primordial black hole with Earth
• Stringent neutrino flux constraints on anti-quark nugget dark matter
• Dark matter searches using accelerometer-based networks
• Small glitches: the role of strange nuggets?
• Microscopic composite systems bound by strong gravity in extra dimensions as candidates for dark matter