Speaker
Description
Neutron Stars (NSs) make a unique physical laboratory with extreme physical conditions that are irreproducible in experiments and capable of inducing a hadron-to-quark deconfinement phase transition in their interior. Given the high densities reached by the cold nuclear matter in NSs, it is speculated that NS cores may contain deconfined quark matter (QM). State-of-the-art inputs from multi-disciplinary physics (like the chiral effective field theory, astrophysical observations, and perturbative quantum chromodynamics (pQCD)) can constrain QM in NSs. We show this by imposing new constraints on the widely accepted phenomenological MIT Bag model for QM, allowing for a mixed phase, and further using them to comment on the phase of matter in NS cores. We also find that the pQCD constraint is crucial in constraining the strong interaction coupling at NS energies. If the deconfined QM is more stable than ordinary nuclear matter, such a phase transition is known to form exotic compact objects known as Strange Stars (SSs) made of strange quark matter. We discuss various observational signatures and how the future gravitational wave detectors and the upcoming electromagnetic telescopes can be used to probe quark matter in neutron stars. This is also important from the point of view of fundamental physics as it holds the potential to settle the long-standing problem of the true ground state of matter in the universe.
| Category | Theory |
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