Speaker
Description
We explore the role of color superconductivity in quarkyonic matter under the conditions of electric and charge neutrality at β-equilibrium, as relevant for neutron stars. By explicitly incorporating color-superconducting pairing gap into the phenomenological model of a crossover transition from hadron to quark matter, we extend the known quarkyonic framework suggested by McLerran and Reddy to include this essential aspect relevant at high densities. We demonstrate that reaching the conformal limit of QCD within the proposed model is provided by the proper momentum dependence of the pairing gap, motivated by effective chiral quark approaches with nonlocal interaction among quarks. We utilize the flexible metamodelling approach to nuclear matter, analyze the structure of the shell of hadrons in momentum space and focus on the effects of color superconductivity in quarkyonic matter. Similarly to the effects caused by the onset of quarkyonic phase, color superconductivity leads to stiffening of the equation of state of the neutron star matter. This causes a significant impact on observable properties of neutron stars, which are analyzed and confronted to recent astrophysical and theoretical constraints. We argue that the developed model of color-superconducting quarkyonic matter provides a new consistent tool for studying the scenario of smooth quark-hadron crossover in neutron stars.
