Search for Strange Quark Matter and Nuclearites on Board the International Space Station (SQM-ISS): A Future Detector to Search for Massive, Non-Relativistic Objects in Space

SQM-ISS is a detector that will search from the International Space Station for massive particles possibly present among the cosmic rays. Among them, we mention strange quark matter, Q-Balls, lumps of fermionic exotic compact stars, Primordial Black Holes, mirror matter, Fermi balls, etc. These compact, dense objects would be much heavier than normal nuclei, have velocities of galaxy-bound systems, and would be deeply penetrating. The detector is based on a stack of scintillator and piezoelectric elements which can provide information on both the charge state and mass, with the additional timing information allowing to determine the speed of the particle, searching for particles with velocities of the order of galactic rotation speed (v ≲ 250 km/s). In this work, we describe the apparatus and its observational capabilities.

SQM-ISS is a detector that will search from the International Space Station for massive particles possibly present among the cosmic rays. Among them, we mention strange quark matter, Q-Balls, lumps of fermionic exotic compact stars, Primordial Black Holes, mirror matter, Fermi balls, etc. These compact, dense objects would be much heavier than normal nuclei, have velocities of galaxy-bound systems, and would be deeply penetrating. The detector is based on a stack of scintillator and piezoelectric elements which can provide information on both the charge state and mass, with the additional timing information allowing to determine the speed of the particle, searching for particles with velocities of the order of galactic rotation speed (v less than or similar to 250 km/s). In this work, we describe the apparatus and its observational capabilities.