Physical Properties of Strangelets

Abstract

Low-baryon number lumps of strange quark matter, strangelets, are presently searched for in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion experiments at CERN and Brookhaven. This paper gives an overview of the physical properties of strangelets with emphasis on experimental signatures such as mass and charge. Direct solutions of the Dirac equation with MIT bag model boundary conditions are applied and compared to calculations based on a smoothed density of states, as well as to simple mass-formulae based on the MIT bag. Most strangelet properties can be understood within an approximation including bulk, surface and curvature energy contributions.