Strange quark matter and strangelets in the quasiparticle model

The quasiparticle model has been extended to include finite-size effects, and applied to study the properties of strange quark matter and strangelets. A chemical potential- and radius-dependent effective bag quantity is derived. In this extended version of the quasiparticle model, strange quark matter and/or strangelets still have the chance to be metastable or absolutely stable. The stable radius of a strangelet in the present model is smaller than, but comparable with that of the corresponding nucleus with the same baryon number, which might be relevant for the analysis of the strangelet propagation and detection. The influence of the model parameters on the stability of strangelets is discussed.