Hydrodynamic Simulations of the Combustion of Dense Hadronic Matter into Quark Matter

Abstract

We perform special-relativistic one-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations to study the combustion of hadronic matter into quark matter in neutron star conditions. For the equation of state, we use a relativistic mean-field Walecka model for hadronic matter and the MIT bag model for quark matter. We study the growth of a small core of quark matter surrounded by hadronic matter at constant density, where both regions are initially at rest. We show that a strong detonation front propagates into hadronic matter converting it into quark matter. We find that the timescale for the conversion of a compact star is around tens of microseconds.