Limits on the nuclearite flux using the ANTARES neutrino telescope

In this work, a search for nuclearites of strange quark matter by using nine years of ANTARES data taken in the period 2009-2017 is presented. The passage through matter of these particles is simulated taking into account a detailed description of the detector response to nuclearites and of the data acquisition conditions. A down-going flux of cosmic nuclearites with Galactic velocities (β = 10-3) was considered for this study. The mass threshold for detecting these particles at the detector level is 4 × 1013 GeV/c 2. Upper limits on the nuclearite flux for masses up to 1017 GeV/c 2 at the level of ∼ 5 × 10-17 cm-2 s-1 sr-1 are obtained. These are the first upper limits on nuclearites established with a neutrino telescope and the most stringent ever set for Galactic velocities. © 2023 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab.