In this work, a search for nuclearites of strange quark matter by using nine
years of ANTARES data taken in the period 2009-2017 is presented. The passage
through matter of these particles is simulated %according to the model of de
R\'{u}jula and Glashow taking into account a detailed description of the
detector response to nuclearites and of the data acquisition conditions. A
down-going flux of cosmic nuclearites with Galactic velocities (β=10−3) was considered for this study. The mass threshold for detecting these
particles at the detector level is \mbox{ 4×1013 GeV/c2}.
Upper limits on the nuclearite flux for masses up to 1017 GeV/c2 at
the level of ∼5×10−17 cm−2 s−1 sr−1 are
obtained. These are the first upper limits on nuclearites established with a
neutrino telescope and the most stringent ever set for Galactic velocities.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure