Strongly interacting matter in the form of nuggets of nuclear-density material is not currently excluded as a dark matter candidate in the ten gram to hundreds of kilogram mass range. A recent variation on quark nugget dark matter models postulates that a first-order imbalance between matter and antimatter at the quark-gluon phase transition in the early Universe could lead to most of the dark matter bound into heavy (baryon number $B\sim 10^{25}$) antiquark nuggets in the current epoch, explaining both the dark matter preponderance and the matter-antimatter asymmetry. Interactions of these massive objects with normal matter in the Earth and Sun lead to annihilation and an associated neutrino flux in the $\sim 30\mathrm{MeV}$ range. We calculate these fluxes for antiquark nuggets of sufficient flux to account for the dark matter and find that current neutrino flux limits from Super-Kamiokande (SuperK) exclude these objects as major dark matter candidates at a high confidence level. Antiquark nuggets in the previously allowed mass range cannot account for more than $\sim 15\%$ of the dark matter flux.

• Received 6 November 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.103002