Related papers: The Cosmic Quarks
The cosmic first order phase transition from quarks to hadrons, occurring a few microseconds after the Big Bang, would lead to the formation of quark nuggets which would be stable on a cosmological time scale, if the associated baryon…
The abundance and size distribution of quark nuggets (QN), formed a few microseconds after the big bang due to first order QCD phase transition in the early universe, has been estimated. It appears that stable QNs could be a viable…
"Dark quark nuggets", a lump of dark quark matter, can be produced in the early universe for a wide range of confining gauge theories and serve as a macroscopic dark matter candidate. The two necessary conditions, a nonzero dark baryon…
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…
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 entirely plausible under reasonable condition, that a first order QCD phase transition occurred from quarks to hadrons when the universe was about a microsecond old. Relics, if there be any, after the quark hadron phase transition are…
We calculate the size distribution of quark nuggets, which could be formed due to first order QCD phase transition in the early universe. We find that there are a large number of stable Quark Nuggets which could be a viable candidate for…
Astrophysicists distinguish between three different types of compact stars. These are white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. The former contain matter in one of the densest forms found in the Universe which, together with the…
Creation of strange quark stars through strong interaction deconfinement is studied based on modern estimates of hyperon formation in neutron stars. The hyperon abundance is shown to be large enough so that if strange quark matter (SQM) is…
This paper gives an brief overview of the structure of hypothetical strange quarks stars (quark stars, for short), which are made of absolutely stable 3-flavor strange quark matter. Such objects can be either bare or enveloped in thin…
Strange Quark Nuggets are the relics of the microsecond old universe after the big bang. The universe having experienced a mini inflation of 7-e folding has gone through supercooling leading to a first order phase transition from quark to…
The implications of the formation of strange quark matter in neutron stars and in core-collapse supernovae is discussed with special emphasis on the possibility of having a strong first order QCD phase transition at high baryon densities.…
The question of whether quark matter exists in neutron stars is a long standing one. Generally one finds that a first order phase transition from baryons to quarks softens the equation of state so much that the star would collapse into a…
It is generally agreed on that the tremendous densities reached in the centers of neutron stars provide a high-pressure environment in which several intriguing particles processes may compete with each other. These range from the generation…
Our world is wonderful because of the normal but negligibly small baryonic part (i.e., atoms) although unknown dark matter and dark energy dominate the Universe. A stable atomic nucleus could be simply termed as ``strong matter'' since its…
We suggest that dark matter is made up of massive quark objects that have survived from the Big Bang, representing the ground state of ``baryonic'' matter. Hence, there was no overall phase transition of the original quark matter, but only…
Under extreme conditions of temperature and/or density, quarks and gluons are expected to undergo a deconfinement phase transition. While this is an ephemeral phenomenon at the ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collider (BNL-RHIC), quark matter…
At very large densities and/or temperatures a quark-hadron phase transition is expected to take place. Simulations of QCD on lattice at zero baryon density indicate that the transition occurs at $T_c \sim 150-170$ MeV. The calculations…
The fact that strange sea quarks are abundant in the nucleons, but with zero net strangeness, is of great importance for understanding the nature of matter condensed by the strong interaction, particularly in the context of the ``gigantic…
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…