Speaker
Description
Over the past decades, theories have predicted the existence of heavy compact objects containing an extremely dense form of exotic matter named Strange Quark Matter (SQM). This type of hypothetical matter is composed of nearly equal quantities of up, down and strange quarks and is supposed to be the ground state of Quantum Chromodynamics. Nuclearites are the massive component of SQM particles. Some studies show that nuclearites heavier than 1013 GeV with velocities of approximately 250 km/s could reach the Earth and could be observed by neutrino telescopes. KM3NeT is a network of deep-sea neutrino telescopes located in the Mediterranean Sea, dedicated to the search for high-energy cosmic neutrinos and the study of neutrino properties. The KM3NeT detector consists of two large volume photomultiplier (PMT) arrays, ARCA (Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss) and ORCA (Oscillation Research with Cosmics in the Abyss), placed at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea in Italy (3500 m) and France (2475 m), respectively. The ARCA configuration will be composed of two building blocks with 115 Detection Units (DUs), each DU containing 18 Digital Optical Modules (DOMs), while ORCA will be composed of only one building block. ARCA is optimized for the detection of high energy neutrinos, in the range TeV-PeV. The main goals for this detector are to identify and study the high energy cosmic neutrino sources, as well as to validate the diffuse neutrino flux measured with the IceCube detector. ORCA is a more compact detector that is optimized for the study of atmospheric neutrinos, having the exciting purpose to study the neutrino oscillations in order to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. The detectors are currently under construction and they are already taking data with the first installed lines. Nuclearites can be detected by the instrumented area through the visible blackbody radiation generated along their path inside or near the instrumented area. Neutrino telescopes represent a powerful tool for the study of nuclearites due to their large sensitive volumes and to their deep-sea locations. The detection and characterisation of this type of particles could make breakthrough discoveries in the fundamental physics and could provide information on the Dark Matter component of the Universe. In this contribution, Monte Carlo simulations are used in order to evaluate the detector response to nuclearites and preliminary results on the sensitivities of the KM3NeT neutrino telescope for a flux of down-going nuclearites are presented.
