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Abstract

It was conjectured that the basic units of the ground state of bulk strong
matter may be strange-clusters called strangeons, and they can form self-bound
strangeon stars that are highly compact. Strangeon stars can develop a strange
quark matter (SQM) core at high densities, particularly in the
color-flavor-locking phase, yielding a branch of hybrid strangeon stars. We
explore the stellar structure and astrophysical implications of hybrid
strangeon stars. We find that hybrid strangeon stars can meet various
astrophysical constraints on pulsar masses, radii, and tidal deformabilities.
Finally, we show that the strangeon-SQM mixed phase is not preferred if the
charge-neutrality condition is imposed at the strangeon-SQM transition region.