Speaker
Description
An intriguing hypothesis states that ordinary hadronic matter in bulk is a metastable state (i.e., a local minimum) of strongly interacting matter, while strange quark matter (SQM) is absolutely stable (i.e., the global minimum). These two phases would be separated by a potential barrier that prevents a spontaneous deconfinement transition of ordinary hadronic matter into SQM.
Our work aims to determine the conditions under which this barrier can be overcome and to assess whether such conditions may naturally occur in high-energy astrophysical environments, such as core-collapse supernovae and binary compact star mergers. In these scenarios, the formation of a critical SQM seed could ultimately lead to the conversion of a hadronic star into a strange quark star.
It is usually assumed that the local flavor composition remains fixed during the initial formation of the SQM seed, given that the weak interactions are too slow to change it significantly. However, it has been suggested that the composition fluctuates around its average equilibrium values at the typical temperatures of high-energy astrophysical processes. I will address this effect by considering the local thermal fluctuations of the hadronic composition, showing that they make the formation of SQM much easier. Moreover, I will discuss the role of color-superconductivity in such a phenomenon.
