B Dark Matter: 6-Quark Particle?

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We know the total amount of baryonic matter from big bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. I don't see how such an addition could have stayed undetected. The authors don't discuss this at all, which is a bad sign.
 
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This requires that a particle that is only seen (and not very cleanly at that) in one experiment be real, and also to form a condensate that increases its lifetime by forty orders of magnitude. Furthermore, the authors don't even discuss the impact of this idea on BBN, the most powerful constraint on hadronic candidates.
 
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I don't quite understand how this could be a dark matter candidate as it is made up of charged particles (quarks) thus should interact with light ... which, by definition, makes it matter not dark matter
 
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AndyG said:
I don't quite understand how this could be a dark matter candidate as it is made up of charged particles (quarks) thus should interact with light ... which, by definition, makes it matter not dark matter
Neutron has a magnetic dipole moment but no charge. Plenty of nuclei have no dipole moment.
If a nucleus were stable and had no charge, how much cross-section would it have to scatter photons elastically? To scatter other nuclei strongly?
 
Neutron has no charge but does consist of quarks and does interact with light (and other matter) ...
 
mfb said:
We know the total amount of baryonic matter from big bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background. I don't see how such an addition could have stayed undetected. The authors don't discuss this at all, which is a bad sign.
I'm not defending the hypothesis, but I think the idea is that these Bose-Einstein condensates of hexaquarks condensed out before big bang nucleosynthesis. Then they would not impact the total amount of baryonic matter we see from BBN or the CMB.
 
I didn't get the impression that they would be bound enough to not matter during BBN.
 
But hexaquarks are still strongly interacting guys and thus everything else than "dark", or do I miss something in the argument?
 
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