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(1) Quark nugget . Twenty years ago, Witten pointed out that matter made of up, down and strange quarks is (by the Pauli Principle) more likely to be stable than matter made of just up and down. If stable, it could exist in macroscopic nuggets of nuclear densities. We searched about a million seismic reports to the US Geological Survey (1990–1993) for evidence of such (multi-ton) nuggets passing through the Earth. We found one set of 9 reports with first signal timing and directions and subsequent wave forms all consistent with nugget passage, but not consistent with point events such as Earthquakes, nor with statistics of random reports. Others, however, showed that our results were incorrect because of a problem with the clock of one reporting station. (2) Quinton radiation . If the accelerating expansion of the universe is due to a quintessence field, radiation of quintessence quanta (or “quintons” I like to call them) could be an energy loss mechanism for binary systems. We calculated its strength assuming only the minimal interaction required by general covariance. We considered both the case in which the zero order field varies only over cosmic times and distances and that in which it is modified my nearby masses. For the former, the effect is too small to be observable. For the latter , we bound a parameter in the quintessence field solution in the presence of a large mass by requiring that the effect be small for the Hulse–Taylor pulsar. |
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