In spite of its key role in compact star physics, the surface tension of quark matter is not well comprehended yet. In this work we analyze the behavior of the surface tension of three-flavor quark matter in the outer and inner core of cold deleptonized magnetars, proto magnetars born in core collapse supernovae, and hot magnetars produced in binary neutron stars mergers. We explore the role of temperature, baryon number density, trapped neutrinos, droplet size, and magnetic fields within the multiple reflection expansion formalism. Quark matter is described within the MIT bag model and is assumed to be in chemical equilibrium under weak interactions. We discuss some astrophysical consequences of our results.
We study the surface tension of hot, highly magnetized three flavor quark matter droplets, focusing specifically on the thermodynamic conditions prevailing in neutron stars, hot lepton rich protoneutron stars and neutron star mergers. We explore the role of temperature, baryon number density, trapped neutrinos, droplet size and magnetic fields within the multiple reflection expansion formalism (MRE), assuming that astrophysical quark matter can be described as a mixture of free Fermi gases composed by quarks $u$, $d$, $s$, electrons and neutrinos, in chemical equilibrium under weak interaction…
If a first-order phase transition separates nuclear and quark matter at large baryon density, an interface between these two phases has a nonzero surface tension. We calculate this surface tension within a nucleon-meson model for domain walls and bubbles. Various methods and approximations are discussed and compared, including a numerical evaluation of the spatial profile of the interface. We also compute the surface tension at the other first-order phase transitions of the model: the nuclear liquid-gas transition and, in the parameter regime where it exists, the direct transition from the vac…
We study the baryonic fluctuations from second to eighth order involving electric charge, baryon number and strangeness below the quark-gluon plasma crossover and numerically known from lattice QCD calculations. By considering a particular realization of the Hadron Resonance Gas model, we provide evidence on the dominant role of quark-diquark degrees of freedom to describe excited baryonic resonances. After proving by means of suitable Polyakov loop correlators that the quark-diquark and the quark-antiquark forces coincide, $V_{\bar q q } (r) = V_{\bar q D } (r) + \textrm{const}$, we find that…
The interface effects play important roles for the properties of strange quark matter (SQM) and the related physical processes. We show several examples on the implications of interface effects for both stable and unstable SQM. Based on an equivparticle model and adopting mean-field approximation (MFA), the surface tension and curvature term of SQM can be obtained, which are increasing monotonically with the density of SQM at zero external pressure. For a parameter set constrained according to the 2$M_\odot$ strange star, we find the surface tension is $\sim$2.4 MeV/fm${}^2$, while it is large…
We study the string tension $σ$ of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in external magnetic fields $B$ by combining the quasi-particle treatments for quarks with the collective treatments for gluons. We utilize the 1/Nc-expansion (Nc: number of colors) and the framework of Wilson's strong coupling expansion at long distance, and compare the resulting string tensions with the lattice data. The effects of magnetic fields are taken into account through the dielectric functions, which are evaluated from the one-loop polarization due to light flavor quarks with $B$-dependent effective masses $M_{\rm f}(B)…
We investigate systematically the quark-hadron mixed phase in dense stellar matter, and its influence on compact star structures. The properties of quark matter and hadronic matter are fixed based on various model predictions. Beside adopting constant values, the surface tension $Σ$ for the quark-hadron interface is estimated with the multiple reflection expansion method and equivparticle model. To fix the structures of quark-hadron pasta phases, a continuous dimensionality of the structure is adopted as proposed by Ravenhall, Pethick, and Wilson. The corresponding properties of hybrid stars a…
