Neutrino sparking and the neutron to strange stars conversion

Abstract

We address the production of strangelets inside neutron stars by means of high-energy neutrino interactions (sparking). Requiring that neutron stars remain as such along their lifetimes, we obtain a bound on the probability of a strangelet in the final state and compare it with existing laboratory limits. It turns out that this mechanism is not likely to drive a neutron $\to$ strange stars conversion for realistic values of the minimum center-mass-energy necessary to produce the quark-gluon plasma, a necessary precondition for the formation of the strangelet.

RevTex file, no figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (1)

• Quantum Nucleation of Two-Flavor Quark Matter in Neutron Stars

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Equation of State of a Dense and Magnetized Fermion System
• Deconfinement and color superconductivity in cold neutron stars
• Constraining decaying dark matter with neutron stars
• Neutrino emission and initial evolution of axionic quark nuggets