Gamma Ray Bursts and the transition to Quark Matter in Compact Stars Original Research Article

We discuss a model for long Gamma-Ray-Bursts in which the central engine is associated with the conversion process of a metastable hadronic star into a star containing quark matter. We analyze also the observational signatures of the model, i.e. the Supernova-GRB temporal connection and the existence of long quiescent times in the temporal structure of Gamma-Ray-Bursts.