Prospects for macroscopic dark matter detection at space-based and suborbital experiments

¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Lehman College, City University of New York - New York, NY 10468, USA
² Department of Physics, Graduate Center, City University of New York - New York, NY 10016, USA
³ Department of Astrophysics, American Museum of Natural History - New York, NY 10024, USA
⁴ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Torino - Torino 10125, Italy
⁵ Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Section of Roma Tor Vergata - Rome, Italy
⁶ Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, KICP, EFI, University of Chicago - Chicago, IL 60637, USA
⁷ Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
⁸ University of Maryland, Baltimore County - Baltimore, MD 21250, USA
⁹ Georgia Institute of Technology - 837 State Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0430, USA
¹⁰ Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw - Warsaw, Poland
¹¹ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa - Iowa City, IA 52242, USA
¹² Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines - Golden, CO 80401, USA
¹³ National Centre for Nuclear Research - Lodz, 90-559, Poland

^(a) luis.anchordoqui@gmail.com (corresponding author)

Received: 18 April 2021
Accepted: 5 July 2021

Abstract

We compare two different formalisms for modeling the energy deposition of macroscopically sized/massive quark nuggets (also known as macros) in the Earth's atmosphere. We show that for a reference mass of 1 g, there is a discrepancy in the macro luminosity of about 14 orders of magnitude between the predictions of the two formalisms. Armed with our finding we estimate the sensitivity for macro detection at space-based (Mini-EUSO and POEMMA) and suborbital (EUSO-SPB2) experiments.