Hadron-quark phase transition in dense stars

An equation of state is computed for a plasma of one flavour quarks interacting through some phenomenological potential, at zero temperature. Assuming that the confining potential is scalar and colour-independent, it is shown that the quarks undergo a first-order mass phase transition. In addition, due to the way screening is introduced, all the thermodynamic quantities computed are independent of the actual shape of the interquark potential. This equation of state is then generalized to a several quark flavour plasma and applied to the study of the hadron-quark phase transition inside a neutron star. (orig.)