Quark phases in neutron stars and a third family of compact stars as signature for phase transitions

By K. Schertler, Carsten Greiner, J. Schaffner-Bielich, M. Thoma. 2000

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The appearance of quark phases in the dense interior of neutron stars provides one possibility to soften the equation of state (EOS) of neutron star matter at high densities. This softening leads to more compact equilibrium configurations of neutron stars compared to pure hadronic stars of the same mass. We investigate the question to which amount the compactness of a neutron star can be attributed to the presence of a quark phase. For this purpose we employ several hadronic EOS in the framework of the relativistic mean-field (RMF) model and an extended MIT bag model to describe the quark phase. We find that — almost independent of the model parameters — the radius of a pure hadronic neutron star gets typically reduced by 20–30% if a pure quark phase in the center of the star does exist. For some EOS we furthermore find the possibility of a third family of compact stars which may exist besides the two known families of white dwarfs and neutron stars. We show how an experimental proof of the existence of a third family by mass and radius measurements may provide a unique signature for a phase transition inside neutron stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fc7c52663a2580299163a74236ec3fee4999fb3

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Citations in the corpus

Hybrid Stars that Masquerade as Neutron Stars (2004, background): “…stars are predicted to have lower maximum mass (M P 1:7 M ) than nuclear matter stars (M P 2:2 M ) (Lattimer & Prakash 2001; Haensel 2003;Maieron et al. 2004; Alford & Reddy 2003; Buballa et al. 2004; Banik &Bandyopadhyay 2003; Burgio et al. 2002a, 2002b; Gocke et al. 2001; Schertler et al. 2000).”
A new quark-hadron hybrid equation of state for astrophysics - I. High-mass twin compact stars (2014, background): “…and Banik & Bandyopadhyay (2001), respectively; hyperons have been studied by Schaffner-Bielich et al. (2002); and quark matter has been studied by Glendenning & Kettner (2000), Schertler et al. (2000), Fraga et al. (2002), Banik & Bandyopadhyay (2003), Agrawal & Dhiman (2009), and Agrawal (2010).”
What can be learned from a future supernova neutrino detection (2017, background): “maximum mass of cold neutron stars [180, 181, 182] and so exotic stars could be identified by their different mass-radius relationship [183].”
CORE-COLLAPSE SUPERNOVA EXPLOSIONS TRIGGERED BY A QUARK–HADRON PHASE TRANSITION DURING THE EARLY POST-BOUNCE PHASE (2010, background): “Further corrections from the strong interaction coupling constant can stiffen the normal bag EoS and therefore lead to higher maximum masses of compact stars (see e.g. Schertler et al. 2000; Alford et al. 2005; Sagert et al. 2010; Weissenborn et al. 2011).”