QUARK STARS AND QUANTUM-MAGNETICALLY INDUCED COLLAPSE

Abstract

Quark matter is expected to exist in the interior of compact stellar objects as neutron stars or even the more exotic strange stars, based on the Bodmer–Witten conjecture. Bare strange quark stars and (normal) strange quark-matter stars, those possessing a baryon (electron-supported) crust, are hypothesized as good candidates to explain the properties of a set of peculiar stellar sources such as the enigmatic X-ray source RX J1856.5-3754, some pulsars such as PSR B1828-11 and PSR B1642-03, and the anomalous X-ray pulsars and soft γ-ray repeaters. In the MIT bag model, quarks are treated as a degenerate Fermi gas confined to a region of space having a vacuum energy density B bag (the Bag constant). In this note, we modify the MIT bag model by including the electromagnetic interaction. We also show that this version of the MIT model implies the anisotropy of the bag pressure due to the presence of the magnetic field. The equations of state of the degenerate quarks gases are studied in the presence of ultra strong magnetic fields. The behavior of a system made up of quarks having (or not) anomalous magnetic moment is reviewed. A structural instability is found, which is related to the anisotropic nature of the pressures in this highly magnetized matter. The conditions for the collapse of this system are obtained and compared to a previous model of neutron stars that is built on a neutron gas having anomalous magnetic moment.