Role of thermal fluctuations in nucleation of three-flavor quark matter

TL;DR

This paper develops a thermodynamic framework to analyze how thermal fluctuations and color-superconductivity influence the nucleation of three-flavor quark matter in astrophysical environments, highlighting the lowering of energy barriers.

Contribution

It extends previous two-flavor nucleation models to three flavors, incorporating finite-size effects, thermal fluctuations, and the role of color-superconductivity in quark matter formation.

Findings

Thermal fluctuations lower the potential barrier for nucleation.

Diquark pairing reduces the critical radius for nucleation.

Color-superconductivity influences nucleation only in larger systems.

Abstract

We present a framework that aims to investigate the role of thermal fluctuations of the matter composition and color-superconductivity in the nucleation of three-flavor deconfined quark matter in the typical conditions of high-energy astrophysical systems related to compact stars. It is usually assumed that the flavor composition is locally fixed during the formation of the first seed of deconfined quark matter since weak interaction acts too slowly to re-equilibrate flavors. However, the matter composition fluctuates around its average equilibrium values at the typical temperatures of high-energy astrophysical processes. Here, we extend our previous two-flavor nucleation formalism to a three-flavor case. We develop a thermodynamic framework incorporating finite-size effects and thermal fluctuations of local composition to compute the nucleation probability as the product of droplet formation and composition fluctuation rates. Moreover, we discuss the role of color-superconductivity in nucleation, arguing that it can play a role only in systems larger than the typical coherence length of diquark pairs. We found that thermal fluctuations of the matter composition lead to lowering the potential barrier between the metastable hadronic phase and the stable quark phase. Moreover, the formation of diquark pairs reduces the critical radius and thus the potential barrier in the low baryon density and temperature regime.