Exploring detection of nuclearites in a large liquid scintillator neutrino detector

Abstract

We take the JUNO experiment as an example to explore nuclearites in the future large liquid scintillator detector. Comparing to the previous calculations, the visible energy of nuclearites across the liquid scintillator will be reestimated for the liquid scintillator based detector. Then the JUNO sensitivities to the nuclearite flux are presented. It is found that the JUNO projected sensitivities can be better than $7.7 \times 10^{-17} {\rm cm^{-2} s^{-1} sr^{-1}}$ for the nuclearite mass $10^{15} \; {\rm GeV} \leq M \leq 10^{24}$ GeV and initial velocity $10^{-4} \leq \beta_0 \leq 10^{-1}$ with a 20 year running. Note that the JUNO will give the most stringent limits for downgoing nuclearites with $1.6 \times 10^{13} \; {\rm GeV} \leq M \leq 4.0 \times 10^{15}$ GeV and a typical galactic velocity $\beta_0 = 10^{-3}$.