Quark matter nucleation in hot hadronic matter

I Bombaci,D Logoteta,P.K Panda,C Providência,I Vidaña

doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2009.09.039

Abstract

We study the quark deconfinement phase transition in hot β-stable hadronic matter. Assuming a first order phase transition, we calculate the enthalpy per baryon of the hadron–quark phase transition. We calculate and compare the nucleation rate and the nucleation time due to thermal and quantum nucleation mechanisms. We compute the crossover temperature above which thermal nucleation dominates the finite temperature quantum nucleation mechanism. We next discuss the consequences for the physics of proto-neutron stars. We introduce the concept of limiting conversion temperature and critical mass Mcr for proto-hadronic stars, and we show that proto-hadronic stars with a mass M<Mcr could survive the early stages of their evolution without decaying to a quark star.

Highlights

In the last few years there has been a growing interest in the study of the nucleation process of quark matter (QM) in the core of massive neutron stars
The main effect of finite temperature on the quantum nucleation mechanism of quark matter is to modify the energy barrier separating the quark phase from the metastable hadronic phase
As expected for a first order phase transition one has a discontinuity jump in the phase number densities: in our particular case nQ∗ (T, P0) > nH(T, P0). This result, together with the positive value of Q tell us (see Eq (12)), that the transition temperature decreases with pressure

Summary

Introduction

In the last few years there has been a growing interest in the study of the nucleation process of quark matter (QM) in the core of massive neutron stars It has been shown [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] that above a threshold value of the central pressure a pure hadronic compact star (HS) is metastable to the decay (conversion) to a quark star (QS) (i.e. to a hybrid neutron star or to a strange star [9,10], depending on the details of the equation of state (EOS) for quark matter used to model the phase transition [11,12,13,14]). We briefly discuss some consequences for the physics of proto-neutron stars

Phase equilibrium

Quantum and thermal nucleation rates

Equation of state

Results and discussion