Bremsstrahlung emission from quark stars

TL;DR

This paper numerically calculates electron-electron bremsstrahlung emission from quark star surfaces, finding it significantly suppressed and confirming pair production as the dominant emission mechanism across all temperatures.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of bremsstrahlung emissivity from quark stars, revealing suppression effects and reaffirming pair production dominance.

Findings

Bremsstrahlung emissivity is strongly suppressed due to effective photon mass.

Surface flux from bremsstrahlung is much smaller than previous estimates.

Electron-positron pair production remains the primary emission process at all temperatures.

Abstract

We calculate numerically the emissivity and surface flux of electron-electron bremsstrahlung radiation from the surface of a bare quark star. The restricted electronic phase space due to the presence of an effective photon mass results in a strong suppression. The emissivity and surface flux are found to be substantially smaller than those found in previous work, to the point where electron-positron pair production would remain the dominant mechanism at all temperatures in the relativistic regime. As a consequence, pair production remains a dominant process even at low surface temperatures as originally suggested by Usov in arXiv:astro-ph/9712304.