Bremsstrahlung emission from quark stars

Abstract

We calculate numerically the emissivity and surface flux of electron-electron bremsstrahlung radiation from the surface of a bare quark star. The restricted electronic phase space due to the presence of an effective photon mass results in a strong suppression. The emissivity and surface flux are found to be substantially smaller than those found in previous work, to the point where electron-positron pair production would remain the dominant mechanism at all temperatures in the relativistic regime. As a consequence, pair production remains a dominant process even at low surface temperatures as originally suggested by Usov in arXiv:astro-ph/9712304.