2025/08/14 by Bhattacharjee, Debadri, Chattopadhyay, Pradip Kumar, Bamba, Kazuharu
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.10524
We explore the maximum mass limit of strange stars in quadratic curvature gravity with the non-minimal matter coupling. The characteristic parameters of the quadratic curvature coupling and the non-minimal matter coupling imply the contributions from higher-order curvature terms and the coupling between matter and geometry, respectively. We explicitly demonstrate that the conservation of the energy-momentum tensor can be modified, and that in the vanishing limit of the non-minimal matter coupling, the formalism of general relativity is recovered. By deriving the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations from the gravitational field equations and applying the MIT bag model equation of state, we obtain the corresponding mass-radius relationships for strange stars. Furthermore, we show that the maximum mass limit of strange stars can exceed the general relativistic counterpart. Specifically, we find that a maximum mass up to 3.11 solar mass is achievable, suggesting that the lighter companion of GW190814 could plausibly be a strange star.