Seismic detection of nuclearites

We make use of Monte Carlo methods to determine the mass range over which "nuclearites," nuggets of stable strange quark matter, should they in fact exist and have densities in the 10¹⁴ g/cm³ range as expected, could be detected seismically. We assume an isotropic, Maxwellian galactic distribution and take into account the Sun's velocity with respect to the galactic center of mass. We consider a model with 287 actual seismic stations, 48 of which have sufficient sensitivity to detect 1 kT of TNT with 1% coupling at 5000 km. We assume a single average global sound propagation speed of 10 km/s. We assume 5% coupling to seismic waves for nuclearites. A nuclearite event should have a distinctive signal because of the large ratio (4 to 80) of nuclearite speed of sound in the Earth. Detection of a nuclearite would require at least six station sites to fix its impact time and location and its (vector) velocity. We require seismic detection of signals by at least seven stations in order to separate nuclearite events from random spurious coincidences. The result is that about a twelfth of nuclearites with mass below one metric ton and about a third of those below ten metric tons could be detected.