Strangelets at finite temperature

Abstract

Within the MIT bag model picture of QCD, we have studied the stability of finite size strangelets at finite temperature with baryon number $A \leq 100$. The light quarks $u$ and $d$ are considered massless while mass of the $s$ quark is taken as $150$ MeV. Using discrete eigen energies of the non-interacting quarks in the bag, grand canonical partition function is constructed and then the free energy is minimized with respect to the bag radius. In the $T\rightarrow 0$ limit clear shell structures are found which persist upto about $T=10$ MeV. Infact for $A=6$ the shell structure disappears only at $T > 20$ MeV.