Related papers: Astro-quark matter: a challenge facing astropartic…
The quark matter may have great implications in astrophysical studies, which could appear in the early Universe, in compact stars, and/or as cosmic rays. After a general review of astrophysical quark matter, the density-dominated quark…
Some of the means through which the possible presence of nearly deconfined quarks in neutron stars can be detected by astrophysical observations of neutron stars from their birth to old age are highlighted.
It is a pity that the real state of matter in pulsar-like stars is still not determined confidently because of the uncertainty about cold matter at supranuclear density, even 40 years after the discovery of pulsar. Nuclear matter (related…
Some recent developments concerning the role of strange quark matter for astrophysical systems and the QCD phase transition in the early universe are addressed. Causality constraints of the soft nuclear equation of state as extracted from…
The physics of strange quark matter in the core of compact stars and recent compact star data is reviewed. Emphasis is put on the possible existence of a third family of strange quark stars.
A pedagogical overview of strange quark matter and strange stars is presented. After a historical notation of the research and an introduction to quark matter, a major part is devoted to the physics and astrophysics of strange stars, with…
3-flavor quark matter (strange quark matter; SQM) can be stable or metastable for a wide range of strong interaction parameters. If so, SQM can play an important role in cosmology, neutron stars, cosmic ray physics, and relativistic…
The appearance of quark matter in the centers of compact stars has a number of astrophysical implications. In this contribution I discuss the structure and stability of compact stars, gravitational radiation from non-axisymmetric…
Stable lumps of quark matter may be present in cosmic rays at a flux level, which can be detected by high precision cosmic ray experiments sensitive to anomalous "nuclei" with high mass-to-charge ratio. The properties of these lumps, called…
Two kinds of difficulties have challenged the physics community for many years: (1) knowing nature's building blocks (particle physics) and (2) understanding interacting many-body systems (many-body physics). Both of them exist in the…
Massive neutron stars may harbor deconfined quark matter in their cores. I review some recent work on the microphysics and the phenomenology of compact stars with cores made of quark matter. This includes the equilibrium and stability of…
According to the hypothesis that strange quark matter may be the true ground state of matter at extremely high densities, strange quark stars should be stable and could exist in the Universe. It is possible that pulsars may actually be…
Cold and dense nuclear and/or quark matter can be found in the interior of compact stars. It is very challenging to determine the ground state and properties of this matter because of the strong-coupling nature of QCD. I give a pedagogical…
The nature of pulsar-like compact stars is still in controversy although the first pulsar was found more than 40 years ago. Generally speaking, conventional neutron stars and non-mainstream quark stars are two types of models to describe…
Strange stars ought to exist in the universe according to the strange quark matter hypothesis, which states that matter made of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks could be the true ground state of baryonic matter rather…
Densities in compact stars may be such that quarks are no longer confined in hadrons, but instead behave as weakly interacting particles. In this regime perturbative calculations are possible. Yet, due to high pressures and an attractive…
If strange quark matter is stable in small lumps, we expect to find such lumps, called ``strangelets'', on Earth due to a steady flux in cosmic rays. Following recent astrophysical models, we predict the strangelet flux at the top of the…
The existence of deconfined quark matter in the superdense interior of neutron stars is a key question that has drawn considerable attention over the past few decades. Quark matter can comprise an arbitrary fraction of the star, from 0 for…
Does deconfined cold quark matter occur in nature? This is currently one of the fundamental open questions in nuclear astrophysics. In these proceedings, I review the current state-of-the-art techniques to address this question in a…
The possibility of strange stars mixed with dark energy to be one of the candidates for dark energy stars is the main issue of the present study. Our investigation shows that quark matter acts as dark energy after a certain yet unknown…