Stability of strange star crusts and strangelets
- Department of Physics, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130 (United States)
- Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 (United States)
- Theoretical Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545 (United States)
We construct strangelets, taking into account electrostatic effects, including Debye screening, and arbitrary surface tension {sigma} of the interface between vacuum and quark matter. We find that there is a critical surface tension {sigma}{sub crit} below which large strangelets are unstable to fragmentation and below which quark star surfaces will fragment into a crystalline crust made of charged strangelets immersed in an electron gas. We derive a model-independent relationship between {sigma}{sub crit} and two parameters that characterize any quark matter equation of state. For reasonable model equations of state, we find {sigma}{sub crit} typically of order a few MeV/fm{sup 2}. If {sigma}{<=}{sigma}{sub crit}, the size-distribution of strangelets in cosmic rays could feature a peak corresponding to the stable strangelets that we construct.
- OSTI ID:
- 20774803
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 73, Issue 11; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.73.114016; (c) 2006 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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