New window on strange quark matter as the ground state of strongly interacting matter

If strange quark matter is the true ground state of matter, it must have lower energy than nuclear matter. Simultaneously, two-flavor quark matter must have higher energy than nuclear matter, for otherwise the latter would convert to the former. We show, using an effective chiral Lagrangian, that the existence of a new lower energy ground state for two-flavor quark matter, the pion condensate, shrinks the window allowing strange quark matter to be the ground state of matter and sets new limits on the current strange quark mass.