I will examine a model of strangelets as bulk matter with the addition of these finite size effects. The total energy of the strangelet may be written as follows:
where V is the volume of the strangelet, 
is the fine
structure constant, and the sum is over the quark flavors.
For bulk strange matter, the chemical potentials for each of the quark
species were approximately equal. Now, due to the presence of a coulomb
energy, 
will differ from 
. The
expressions for the
thermodynamic potentials, 
, are the same as in the bulk
case. A renormalization point must again be chosen for 
and 
within 
. This choice will
ultimately affect any quantitative predictions, but the qualitative
features should be independent of scale.
An intuitively appropriate choice of scale for this model is the
effective mass of a constituent quark, 
MeV.
Since I am only interested in the general properties of strangelets
and not in detailed predictions, I will not worry about the effects of
choosing a different renormalization point. and n will also be modified
due to surface effects, which may themselves depend on 
and 
. These effects may be parameterized into a surface
tension, 
, giving rise to the second term in the total
energy proportional to 
. The third term represents the
pressure keeping the strangelet bound; B is analogous to the
bag constant of bag models, and is equal to the difference in
the energy of the perturbed vacuum inside the strangelet and the
true QCD vacuum outside. The final term represents the coulomb energy,
proportional to the square of the strangelet charge, 
, and assuming
the charge is evenly distributed.
The ratio of quark species and the size of the strangelet can be found
by minimizing this total energy with
respect to the chemical potentials while the baryon number,
, is held fixed.