Nucleating quark droplets in the core of magnetars

Abstract

To assess the possibility of homogeneous nucleation of quark matter in magnetars, we investigate the formation of chirally symmetric droplets in a cold and dense environment in the presence of an external magnetic field. As a framework, we use the one-loop effective potential of the two-flavor quark-meson model. Within the thin-wall approximation, we extract all relevant nucleation parameters and provide an estimate for the typical time scales for the chiral phase conversion in magnetized compact star matter. We show how the critical chemical potential, critical radius, correlation length and surface tension are affected, and how their combination to define the nucleation time seems to allow for nucleation of quark droplets in magnetar matter even for not so small values of the surface tension.

7pages, 6 figures; v2: Some clarifications added, figure 1 updated

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Interface Effect in QCD Phase Transitions via Dyson-Schwinger Equation Approach
• Constraining quark-hadron interface tension in the multi-messenger era
• Systematic study on the quark-hadron mixed phase in compact stars
• Thermodynamics of 2+1 Flavor Polyakov-Loop Quark-Meson Model under External Magnetic Field
• Effect of strong magnetic field on competing order parameters in two-flavor dense quark matter