Medium effects in strange quark matter and strange stars

Abstract

We investigate the properties of strange quark matter at zero temperature including medium effects. The quarks are considered as quasiparticles which acquire an effective mass generated by the interaction with the other quarks of the dense system. The effective quark masses are derived from the zero momentum limit of the dispersion relations following from an effective quark propagator obtained from resumming one-loop self-energy diagrams in the hard dense loop approximation. This leads to a thermodynamic self-consistent description of strange quark matter as an ideal Fermi gas of quasiparticles. Within this approach we find that medium effects reduce the overall binding energy with respect to 56Fe of strange quark matter. For typical values of the strong coupling constant ( α s ≳ 1) strange quark matter is not absolutely stable. The application to pure strange quark matter stars shows that medium effects have, nevertheless, no impact on the mass-radius relation of the stars. However, a phase transition to hadronic matter at the surface of the stars becomes more likely.