December 10, 2018 Preprint Open Access

Isospin dependence of the critical quark-deconfinement densities

A. Lavagno; V. Greco; A. Drago; M. Di Toro

We explore the dependence of the critical density, separating hadronic matter from a mixed phase of quarks and hadrons, on the ratio $Z/A$. We use both the MIT bag model and the Color Dielectric Model to describe the quark dynamics, while for the hadronic phase we employ various relativistic equations of state. We find that, if the parameters of quark models are fixed so that the existence of quark stars is allowed, then the critical density drops dramatically in the range $Z/A \sim $ 0.3--0.4. Moreover, for $Z/A \sim $ 0.3 the critical density is only slightly larger than the saturation density of symmetric nuclear-matter. This opens the possibility to verify the Witten-Bodmer hypothesis on absolute stability of quark matter using ground-based experiments in which neutron-rich nuclei are tested.