CHIRAL SYMMETRY BREAKING AND STABILITY OF QUARK DROPLETS

We discuss the stability of strangelets — quark droplets with strangeness — in the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio model supplemented by a boundary condition for quark confinement. Effects of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking are considered properly inside quark droplets of arbitrary baryon number. We obtain the energy per baryon number of quark droplets with baryon number from one to thousands. It is shown that strangelets are not the ground states as compared with nuclei, though they can be locally stable.