Neutrino sparking and the neutron to strange stars conversion

Abstract

We address the production of strangelets inside neutron stars by means of high-energy neutrino interactions (sparking). Requiring that neutron stars remain as such along their lifetimes, we obtain a bound on the probability of a strangelet in the final state and compare it with existing laboratory limits. It turns out that this mechanism is not likely to drive a neutron $\to$ strange stars conversion for realistic values of the minimum center-mass-energy necessary to produce the quark-gluon plasma, a necessary precondition for the formation of the strangelet.