The quark gluon plasma ( QGP ) at zero temperature and high baryon number is a system that may be present inside compact stars .
It is quite possible that this cold QGP shares some relevant features with the hot QGP observed in heavy ion collisions , being also a strongly interacting system .
In a previous work we have derived from the QCD Lagrangian an equation of state ( EOS ) for the cold QGP , which can be considered an improved version of the MIT bag-model EOS .
Compared to the latter , our EOS reaches higher values of the pressure at comparable baryon densities .
This feature is due to perturbative corrections and also to nonperturbative effects .
Here we apply this EOS to the study of neutron stars , discussing the absolute stability of quark matter and computing the mass-radius relation for self-bound ( strange ) stars .
The maximum masses of the sequences exceed two solar masses , in agreement with the recently measured values of the mass of the pulsar PSR J1614-2230 , and the corresponding radii of around 10-11 km .