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ABSTRACT Forty years ago Witten suggested that dark matter could be composed of macroscopic clusters of strange quark matter. This idea was very popular for several years, but it dropped out of fashion once lattice quantum chromodynamics calculations indicated that the confinement/deconfinement transition, at small baryonic chemical potential, is not first order, which seemed to be a crucial requirement in order to produce large clusters of quarks. Here, we revisit the conditions under which strangelets can be produced in the Early Universe. We discuss the impact of an instability in the hadronic phase separating a low density, positive-strange-charge phase from a high-density phase with a negative strange charge. This second phase can rapidly stabilize by forming colour-superconducting gaps. The strangelets then undergo partial evaporation. In this way, we obtain distributions of their sizes in agreement with the observational constraints and we discuss the many astrophysical and cosmological implications of these objects. Finally, we examine the most promising techniques to detect this type of strangelets. We also show that strangelets can exist with masses $$\lesssim $$1017 g, while primordial black holes are ruled out in that mass range, allowing us to distinguish between these two dark matter candidates. 

Abstract This review aims at providing an extensive discussion of modern constraints relevant for dense and hot strongly interacting matter. It includes theoretical first-principle results from lattice and perturbative QCD, as well as chiral effective field theory results. From the experimental side, it includes heavy-ion collision and low-energy nuclear physics results, as well as observations from neutron stars and their mergers. The validity of different constraints, concerning specific conditions and ranges of applicability, is also provided. 

Although calculations of QCD thermodynamics from first-principle lattice simulations are limited to zero net-density due to the fermion sign problem, several methods have been developed to extend the equation of state (EoS) to finite values of theB,Q,Schemical potentials. Taylor expansion aroundµ_i=0 (i = B,Q,S) enables to cover with confidence the region up toµ_i/T< 2.5. Recently, a new method has been developed to compute a 2D EoS in the (T,µ_B) plane. It was constructed through aT-expansion scheme (TExS), based on a resummation of the Taylor expansion, and is trusted up to densities aroundµ_B/T= 3.5. We present here the new 4D-TExS EoS, a generalization of the TExS to all 3 chemical potentials, expected to offer a larger coverage than the 4D Taylor expansion EoS. After explaining the basics of theT-Expansion Scheme and how it is generalized to multiple dimensions, we will present results for thermodynamic observables as functions of temperature and both finite baryon and strangeness chemical potentials. 

We present a Bayesian analysis, based on holography and constrained by lattice QCD simulations, which leads to a prediction for the existence and location of the QCD critical point. We employ two different parametrizations of the functions that characterize the breaking of conformal invariance and the baryonic charge in the Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton holographic model. They lead to predictions for the critical point that overlap at one sigma. While some samples of the prior distribution do not predict a critical point, or produce critical points that cover large regions of the phase diagram, all posterior samples present a critical point at chemical potentials µBc~550-630 MeV. 

Proxies for cumulants of baryon number $B$, electric charge $Q$, and strangeness $S$are usually measured in heavy-ion collisions via moments of net-number distribution of given hadronic species. Since these cumulants of conserved charges are expected to be sensitive to the existence of a critical point in the phase diagram of nuclear matter, it is crucial to ensure that the proxies used as substitutes are as close to them as possible. Hence, we use the 4 framework to generate $\text{Au}+\text{Au}$collisions at several collision energies of the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider beam energy scan. We compute second-order net cumulants of $\pi$, $K$, and $p$, for which experimental data have been published as well as the corresponding conserved charge cumulants. We then compare them with proxies, defined in previous lattice QCD and hadron resonance gas model studies, which are shown to reproduce more accurately their associated conserved charge cumulants. We investigate the impact of hadronic rescatterings occurring in the late evolution of the system on these quantities, as well as the amount of signal actually originating from the bulk medium which endures a phase transition.