Abstract
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.
- Received 8 September 2003
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.69.074001
©2004 American Physical Society