Limits on the nuclearite flux using the ANTARES neutrino telescope Albert, Arnaud Díaz García, Antonio Francisco López Coto, Daniel Navas Concha, Sergio ANTARES Collaboration The authors acknowledge the financial support of the funding agencies: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Commissariat a l'energie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA), Commission Europeenne (FEDER fund and Marie Curie Program), Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), LabEx UnivEarthS (ANR-10-LABX-0023 and ANR-18-IDEX-0001), Region Ile-de-France (DIM-ACAV), Region Alsace (contrat CPER), Region Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, Departement du Var and Ville de La Seyne-sur-Mer, France; Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Germany; Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy; Nederlandse organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO), the Netherlands; Executive Unit for Financing Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation (UEFISCDI), Romania; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion, Investigacion y Universidades (MCIU): Programa Estatal de Generacion de Conocimiento (refs. PGC2018-096663-B-C41,-A-C42, -B-C43, -B-C44 and refs. PID2021-124591NB-C41, -C42, -C43) (MCIU/FEDER), Generalitat Valenciana: Prometeo (PROMETEO/2020/019), Grisolia (refs. GRISOLIA/2018/119,/2021/192) and GenT (refs. CIDEGENT/2018/034,/2019/043,/2020/049,/2021/023) programs, Junta de Andalucia (ref. A-FQM-053-UGR18), La Caixa Foundation (ref. LCF/BQ/IN17/11620019), EU: MSC program (ref. 101025085), Spain; Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Innovation, Morocco, and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, Kuwait. We also acknowledge the technical support of Ifremer, AIM and Foselev Marine for the sea operation and the CC-IN2P3 for the computing facilities. In this work, a search for nuclearites of strange quark matter by using nine years of ANTARES data taken in the period 2009-2017 is presented. The passage through matter of these particles is simulated taking into account a detailed description of the detector response to nuclearites and of the data acquisition conditions. A down- going flux of cosmic nuclearites with Galactic velocities (β = 10−3) was considered for this study. The mass threshold for detecting these particles at the detector level is 4 × 1013 GeV/c2. Upper limits on the nuclearite flux for masses up to 1017 GeV/c2 at the level of ∼ 5 × 10−17 cm−2 s−1 sr−1 are obtained. These are the first upper limits on nuclearites established with a neutrino telescope and the most stringent ever set for Galactic velocities. 2023-12-11T09:36:13Z 2023-12-11T09:36:13Z 2022-12-10 journal article Published version: A. Albert et al. Limits on the nuclearite flux using the ANTARES neutrino telescope. JCAP01(2023)012. [https://doi.org/10.1088/1475-7516/2023/01/012] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/86092 10.1088/1475-7516/2023/01/012 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional