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Secretariat: 
Liora Sade 
Tel : 972-8-9343992 
Email: hsade@weizmann.weizmann.ac.il

Vladimir Usov          Professor Department of Condensed Matter Physics  Weizmann Institute,  76100 Rehovot,  Israel

2. A common feature of neutron stars is a very strong magnetic field  at their surface, up to million billion Gauss that is about billion times more than the strength of magnetic fields generated in scientific  laboratories on the Earth. We consider the properties of matter in such a strong magnetic field.

3. In 1984 Witten proposed that strange matter made of quarks is the ground state. If this idea is true, at least some of the compact objects known to astronomers as radio pulsars, accreting X-ray sources, X-ray and gamma-ray bursters, etc. might be strange-quark-matter stars, not neutron stars as usually assumed. We study the properties of strange-quark-matter stars.  The main goal of our research is toinvestigate the physical processes at, and radiation from, the surface of strange-quark-matter stars, with a view to suggesting good observational signatures that will distinguish them from neutron stars. 
 
 

1. Usov V.V.  Millisecond pulsars with extremely strong magnetic fields as a cosmological source of gamma-ray bursts. Nature, 357,  472, 1992

2. Smolsky M.V. and Usov V.V.  Relativistic beam -- magnetic barrier collision and nonthermal radiation of cosmological gamma-ray bursters.  Astrophys. J.461, 858, 1996

3. Usov V.V. Bare quark matter surfaces of strange stars and e⁺e^- emission. Phys. Rev. Letters  80, 230, 1998