Strangeon Matter in a Liquid Drop Model

TL;DR

This paper develops a liquid drop model for 3-flavored strangeon matter, suggesting it could be stable above a certain size with specific parameters, potentially impacting understanding of exotic nuclear states.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological liquid drop model for strangeon matter with two free parameters, exploring its stability and critical size.

Findings

Strangeon matter can be stable for baryon number A > 300.

Stability depends on strangeon mass and potential depth.

Model parameters suggest possible stable strangeon matter at GeV scales.

Abstract

The liquid drop model of 2-flavored ($u$ and $d$) nucleus is well known and successful, analogically, a similar drop model for 3-flavored ($u$, $d$ and $s$) nucleus is developed. A 3-flavored nucleus conjectured could be stable only if its baryon number is lager than a critical one, $A_{\rm c}$, in which strangeons are the constituent as an analogy of nucleons for nucleus. We try to model strangeon matter in a sense of phenomenological liquid drop, with two free parameters: the mass per bayron of a strangeon in vacuum, $M$, and potential deep between strangeons, $\epsilon$. It is found that, for $M\sim$ GeV and $\epsilon\sim 100$ MeV, strangeon matter could be stable and its critical number could be as low as $A_{\rm c}=300$.