I thought that Physical Review Letters had a policy about using new words in titles to papers. How then, did Cryptobaryonic Dark Matter by C. D. Froggatt and H. B. Nielsen get by the censors?
It is proposed that dark matter could consist of compressed collections of atoms (or metallic matter) encapsulated into, for example, 20 cm big pieces of a different phase. The idea is based on the assumption that there exists at least one other phase of the vacuum degenerate with the usual one. Apart from the degeneracy of the phases we only assume standard model physics. The other phase has a Higgs vacuum expectation value appreciably smaller than in the usual electroweak vacuum. The balls making up the dark matter are very difficult to observe directly, but inside dense stars may expand absorbing the star and causing huge explosions (gamma ray bursts). The ratio of dark matter to ordinary matter is expressed as a ratio of nuclear binding energies and predicted to be about 5.
There is one obvious resolution, i.e. that the word has appeared somewhere in academic circles before. I am guessing that if it didn’t appear in the literature before, it might have shown up in a seminar that an editor went to.
I’m not condoning their actions, I’m just trying to postulate an answer to your question.
Both of the searches I did for it, on Google, and in the Web of Science turned up empty (or well Google turned up three hits related to this paper.) And if PRL is going to inforce standards, should they be uniform (and not just based, as you conjecture, on what an editor happens to be familiar with?)
Heh. Well it is certainly a thankless job being a PRL editor. I’m certain I couldn’t handle all the grubbing both referees and authors perform and I have a lot of respect for anyone willing to wade through that mess.