Strange quark decay rates in quark matter at high temperatures

The rates of the main weak processes involving strange quarks in degenerate quark matter are calculated numerically. The calculations are performed for temperatures up to 100 MeV. Pauli-blocking turns out to be very important. The rates obtained differ by three orders of magnitude from simple estimates in the literature. The results are briefly applied to cosmologically produced quark nuggets, and may also be of interest in connection with supernova core collapse and quark-hadron phase transitions in general. (orig.)