The Response of Bare Strange Stars to the Energy Input onto Their Surfaces

We study numerically the thermal emission of $e^+e^-$ pairs from a barestrange star heated by energy input onto its surface; heating starts at somemoment, and is steady afterwards. The thermal luminosity in $e^+e^-$ pairsincreases to some constant value. The rise time and the steady thermalluminosity are evaluated. Both normal and colour superconducting states ofstrange quark matter are considered. The results are used to test the magnetarmodel of soft gamma-ray repeaters where the bursting activity is explained byfast decay of superstrong magnetic fields and heating of the strange starsurface. It is shown that the rise times observed in typical bursts may beexplained in this model only if strange quark matter is a superconductor withan energy gap of more that 1 MeV.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure, submitted to ApJ