• Accepted Paper

Primordial quark stars made of a long-lived false vacuum

Jingdong Shao and Mei Huang

Phys. Rev. D - Accepted 13 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/ktgp-g8mx

Abstract

A false vacuum could be a profound ingredient of fundamental physics, yet its direct detection in laboratories is hindered when the lifetime is exponentially long. Conventional static phase diagrams often discard metastable false vacuum, but we show that in a dynamical treatment of a first-order QCD phase transition at large quark chemical potential that strongly suppresses tunneling, cosmologically long-lived and thus indispensable false vacuum naturally arises, and makes a nontrivial contribution to constituting primordial quark objects. We identify two distinct branches of such primordial quark objects: a quark star crusted with false vacuum, and a nugget specifically referring to a quark star in global false vacuum, which may account for a population of small compact stars. Some long-lived primordial objects may have survived surface evaporation and cooling until the late Universe, and hopefully sow the seeds of high red-shift galaxies. Their false vacuum decay may power γ-ray bursts and kHz gravitational waves within multi-messenger detectors, rendering themselves an astrophysical and thus testable phenomenon.

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