Quark matter nucleation in hot hadronic matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phase transition from hadronic matter to quark matter in hot, beta-stable environments, analyzing nucleation mechanisms, crossover temperatures, and implications for proto-neutron star evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed comparison of thermal and quantum nucleation rates, calculates the crossover temperature, and discusses the critical mass for proto-hadronic stars to avoid quark conversion.

Findings

Thermal nucleation dominates above a certain crossover temperature.

Proto-hadronic stars with mass below the critical mass may avoid quark conversion.

The concept of limiting conversion temperature is introduced for proto-neutron star evolution.

Abstract

We study the quark deconfinement phase transition in hot $\beta$-stable hadronic matter. Assuming a first order phase transition, we calculate the enthalpy per baryon of the hadron-quark phase transition. We calculate and compare the nucleation rate and the nucleation time due to thermal and quantum nucleation mechanisms. We compute the crossover temperature above which thermal nucleation dominates the finite temperature quantum nucleation mechanism. We next discuss the consequences for the physics of proto-neutron stars. We introduce the concept of limiting conversion temperature and critical mass $M_{cr}$ for proto-hadronic stars, and we show that proto-hadronic stars with a mass $M < M_{cr}$ could survive the early stages of their evolution without decaying to a quark star.