`Nonbaryonic' dark matter as baryonic colour superconductor

By A. Zhitnitsky. 2002

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We discuss a novel cold dark matter candidate which is formed from the ordinary quarks during the QCD phase transition when the axion domain wall undergoes an unchecked collapse due to the tension in the wall. If a large number of quarks is trapped inside the bulk of a closed axion domain wall, the collapse stops due to the internal Fermi pressure. In this case, the system in the bulk may reach the critical density when it undergoes a phase transition to a colour superconducting phase with the ground state being the quark condensate, similar to the Cooper pairs in BCS theory. If this happens, the new state of matter representing the diquark condensate with a large baryon number B~1032 becomes a stable soliton-like configuration. Consequently, it may serve as a novel cold dark matter candidate.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6525d91aa98b17b165bde3973468589c5bacbd6