Thickness of the strangelet-crystal crust of a strange star
arXiv:0808.0671 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevC.78.045802
Abstract
It has recently been pointed out that if the surface tension of quark matter is low enough, the surface of a strange star will be a crust consisting of a crystal of charged strangelets in a neutralizing background of electrons. This affects the behavior of the surface, and must be taken into account in efforts to observationally rule out strange stars. We calculate the thickness of this ``mixed phase'' crust, taking into account the effects of surface tension and Debye screening of electric charge. Our calculation uses a generic parametrization of the equation of state of quark matter. For a reasonable range of quark matter equations of state, and surface tension of order a few MeV/fm^2, we find that the preferred crystal structure always involves spherical strangelets, not rods or slabs of quark matter. We find that for a star of radius 10 km and mass 1.5 Msolar, the strangelet-crystal crust can be from zero to hundreds of meters thick, the thickness being greater when the strange quark is heavier, and the surface tension is smaller. For smaller quark stars the crust will be even thicker.
arXiv comment10 pages, LaTeX
References in corpus (28)
- Strange Quark Matter and Compact Stars
- Inhomogeneous Superconductivity in Condensed Matter and QCD
- Crystalline Color Superconductivity
- Small, Dense Quark Stars from Perturbative QCD
- Neutrino Opacities in Nuclear Matter
- Thermal Relaxation in Young Neutron Stars
- Probing strange stars and color superconductivity by r-mode instabilities in millisecond pulsars
- Hadron-quark mixed phase in hyperon stars
- Viscous Boundary Layer Damping of R-Modes in Neutron Stars
- The Strange Star Surface: A Crust with Nuggets
- Shell model versus liquid drop model for strangelets
- Color-flavor locked strangelets
- Evaluating the Gapless Color-Flavor Locked Phase
- Nuclear heating and melted layers in the inner crust of an accreting neutron star
- Thermal Evolution and Light Curves of Young Bare Strange Stars
- The Stability of Strange Star Crusts and Strangelets
- Diagnosing magnetars with transient cooling
- Colour superconductivity in finite systems
- Intermediate mass strangelets are positively charged
- Magnetar oscillations pose challenges for strange stars
- Low-mass normal-matter atmospheres of strange stars and their radiation
- Universal Charge-Radius Relation for Subatomic and Astrophysical Compact Objects
- Finite size effects and the mixed quark-hadron phase in neutron stars
- Surface effects in color superconducting strange-quark matter
- Gaps below strange star crusts
- Photon emissivity of the electrosphere of bare strange stars
- Seismic signatures of strange stars with crust
- Distinguishing Bare Quark Stars from Neutron Stars
Cited by in corpus (18)
- Equation of State of a Dense and Magnetized Fermion System
- Electrically Charged Strange Quark Stars
- Signatures for quark matter from multi-messenger observations
- Strange quark matter fragmentation in astrophysical events
- Surface tension of dense matter at the chiral phase transition
- Non-radial Oscillation Modes of Compact Stars with a Crust
- The Surface Tension of Magnetized Quark Matter
- Chiral pasta
- Strangelet dwarfs
- Surface and curvature properties of charged strangelets in compact objects
- Interface effects of quark matter: Light-quark nuggets and compact stars
- Torsional oscillations of nonbare strange stars
- Electric charge is a magnetic dipole when placed in a background magnetic field
- Thermal Relaxation and Cooling of Quark Stars with a Strangelet Crust
- Multifragmentation model for the production of astrophysical strangelets
- Axion-Polaritons in quark stars: a possible solution to the missing pulsar problem
- Compact dwarfs made of light-quark nuggets
- Multicomponent Superfluids and Superconductors in Dense Nuclear and Quark Matter