THE CONVERSION OF 2-FLAVOR TO 3-FLAVOR QUARK MATTER IN A SUPERNOVA CORE

The physical process that nuclear matter turns into strange quark matter in a supernova core, studied by Gentile et al. (1993), is very likely to consist of two distinguishable processes. The first is a phase transition between nuclear matter and two-flavor quark matter. The second, which have been investigated in this paper, is conversion of the two-flavor quark matter to more stable three-flavor quark matter. We find that the timescale of the conversion is below 10(-7) s. Owing to this conversion both the temperature in the inner core and the neutrino energy in the whole core increases significantly. These results could enhance both the probability of success for a supernova explosion and the total energy of the revived shock wave, and could also affect the cooling of a newborn neutron star. There exists Schwarzschild convection in the core.