Abstract

The phase transition of chiral symmetry restoration in strange hadronic matter is studied in the chiral SU(3) quark mean field model. When the baryon density is larger than a critical density rho(c), the minimal energy density of the system occurs at the point where the effective masses of nucleon, Lambda, or Xi drop to zero. The physical quantities change discontinuously at this density and the system will be in the phase of chiral. symmetry restoration. A rich phase structure of strange hadronic matter with different strangeness fraction f(s) is obtained.