Quark Stars as inner engines for Gamma Ray Bursts?

Abstract

A model for Gamma ray bursts inner engine based on quark stars (speculated to exist in nature) is presented. We describe how and why these objects might constitute new candidates for GRB inner engines. At the heart of the model is the onset of exotic phases of quark matter at the surface of such stars, in particular the 2-flavor color superconductivity. A novel feature of such a phase is the generation of particles which are unstable to photon decay providing a natural mechanism for a fireball generation; an approach which is fundamentally different from models where the fireball is generated during collapse or conversion of neutron star to quark star processes. The model is capable of reproducing crucial features of Gamma ray bursts, such as the episodic activity of the engine (multiple and random shell emission) and the two distinct categories of the bursts (two regimes are isolated in the model with \sim 2 s and \sim 81 s burst total duration).

8 pages, 3 figures, new and more appropriate title. Major changes in the text (aspects of the models discussed in more details), better quality Figure 1 and Figure 2 and added Figure 3, version to appear in Astronomy&Astrophysics

References in corpus (1)

• The Glueball sector of two-flavor Color Superconductivity

Cited by in corpus (25)

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• Combustion of a neutron star into a strange quark star: The neutrino signal
• Numerical Simulation of the Hydrodynamical Combustion to Strange Quark Matter
• Gamma-Ray Bursts from quark stars
• Fireballs from Quark Stars in the CFL Phase: Application to Gamma Ray Bursters
• Magnetised hybrid stars: effects of slow and rapid phase transitions at the quark-hadron interface
• Interacting $ud$ and $uds$ quark matter at finite densities and quark stars
• Quiescent times in Gamma-Ray-Bursts: hints of a dormant inner engine
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• The birth of strange stars: kinetics, hydrodynamics and phenomenology of supernovae and GRBs
• A Quark-Nova in the wake of a core-collapse Supernova: a unifying model for long duration Gamma-Ray Bursts and Fast Radio Bursts
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• Electron to selectron pair conversion in a SUSY bubble
• Quark Deconfinement inside Compact Stars and Gamma Ray Bursts Inner Engine
• A supersymmetric model of gamma ray bursts
• Growth of a susy bubble: inhomogeneity effects
• Luminosity of a quark star undergoing torsional oscillations and the problem of gamma ray bursts
• Constraints from Gamma-ray Burst Phenomenology on the Hypothesis of Quark Star as the central engines of Gamma-ray Bursts
• Cooling of Quark Stars in the Color Superconductive Phase: Effect of Photons from Glueball decay