Strangelets formation in high energy heavy-ion collisions

Abstract

The properties of phase diagram of strange quark matter in equilibrium with hadronic matter at finite temperature are studied, where the quark phase and hadron phase are treated by baryon density-dependent quark mass model and hadron resonance gas model with hard core repulsion factor, respectively. The thermodynamic conditions for the formation of metastable strange quark droplets ("strangelets") in relativistic nuclear collisions are discussed. We obtained a rich structure of the phase diagram at finite temperature, and study the dynamical trajectories of an expanding strange fireball. Our results indicate that the strangeness fraction fs, perturbation parameter C, and confinement parameter D have strong influence on the properties of phase diagram and the formation of strangelets. Consider the isentropic expansion process, we found that the initial entropy per baryon is less than or equal to 5, which gives a large probability for the formation of strangelets. Furthermore, a sufficiently large strangeness fraction fs and one-gluon-exchange interaction and sufficiently small confinement interaction create possibilities for the formation of strangelets. On the contrary, the fireball will always complete the hadronization process when fs=0 or C>=0 or D^{1/2}>=170 MeV.

References in corpus (5)

• Hadron-quark mixed phase in hyperon stars
• Surface and curvature properties of charged strangelets in compact objects
• Effect of a magnetic field on the thermodynamic properties of a high-temperature hadron resonance gas with van der Waals interactions
• Strangelets at finite temperature in an equivparticle model
• Strange quark matter and proto-strange stars in an equivaparticle model