Stable stranglets of A > 1000?

[jerich1000]

So far I've read enough articles to believe that stranglets with a mass of greater than the equivalent of 1000 protons can be stable at ordinary tempertures and pressures.

Assuming the strangelet is positively charged, there is no threat to normal matter due to coulumb effects.

I've also read that strengelets can (or must?) have electrons orbiting them.

If so, what's to stop one of those strangelets from sitting on my desk here? Are they inert? Do they not chemically react with normal matter?

If I had 10^50 of them sitting in a bucket could I alloy them with anything, similar to how Carbon is alloyed with iron to make steel?

 

[bcrowell]

So far I've read enough articles to believe that stranglets with a mass of greater than the equivalent of 1000 protons can be stable at ordinary tempertures and pressures.

That's not generally believed to be true.

If strangelets were stable, they'd be positively charged, so they would be repelled by ordinary nuclei, which prevents the doomsday scenario where normal nuclear matter gets turned into strange matter when a single strangelet interacts with it.

Some papers:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0205089
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505584
http://arxiv.org/abs/nucl-ex/0511047
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9910471