CONSTRAINING THE SYMMETRY PARAMETERS OF THE NUCLEAR INTERACTION

By J. Lattimer, Y. Lim. 2012

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One of the major uncertainties in the dense matter equation of state has been the nuclear symmetry energy. The density dependence of the symmetry energy is important in nuclear astrophysics, as it controls the neutronization of matter in core-collapse supernovae, the radii of neutron stars and the thicknesses of their crusts, the rate of cooling of neutron stars, and the properties of nuclei involved in r-process nucleosynthesis. We show that fits of nuclear masses to experimental masses, combined with other experimental information from neutron skins, heavy ion collisions, giant dipole resonances, and dipole polarizabilities, lead to stringent constraints on parameters that describe the symmetry energy near the nuclear saturation density. These constraints are remarkably consistent with inferences from theoretical calculations of pure neutron matter, and, furthermore, with astrophysical observations of neutron stars. The concordance of experimental, theoretical, and observational analyses suggests that the symmetry parameters Sv and L are in the range 29.0–32.7 MeV and 40.5–61.9 MeV, respectively, and that the neutron star radius, for a 1.4 M☉ star, is in the narrow window 10.7 km <R < 13.1 km (90% confidence). We can also set tight limits to the size of neutron star crusts and the fractional moment of inertia they contain, as well as the overall moment of inertia and quadrupole polarizability of 1.4 M☉ stars. Our results also have implications for the disk mass and ejected mass of compact mergers involving neutron stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9416abcd8a605c3df3e1821e7016aede9ef44aba

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Citations in the corpus

Approximate Universal Relations for Neutron Stars and Quark Stars (2016, neutral): “5.1 The Newtonian Limit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 5.2 The Black Hole Limit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 5.3 An Approximate Emergent Symmetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ”
The Nuclear Symmetry Energy (2016, background): “[3] on the basis of data on nuclear dipole polarizability, see also Sec.”
NEW HYPERON EQUATIONS OF STATE FOR SUPERNOVAE AND NEUTRON STARS IN DENSITY-DEPENDENT HADRON FIELD THEORY (2014, background): “These nuclear matter properties are consistent with constraints from theoretical calculations of neutron matter, experimental findings and astrophysical observations of neutron stars (Fischer et al. 2014; Lattimer & Lim 2013).”
EQUATION OF STATE AND NEUTRON STAR PROPERTIES CONSTRAINED BY NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND OBSERVATION (2013, methodology): “In Figure 4, we compare the Sv and L region predicted by our neutron matter results with values extracted from other data (Lattimer & Lim 2013).”
Equation of state sensitivities when inferring neutron star and dense matter properties (2018, result): “4 M is strongly correlated with P (2 n0), which is consistent with the findings by Lattimer & Lim (2013).”
Symmetry Parameter Constraints from a Lower Bound on Neutron-matter Energy (2016, background): “The extracted symmetry energy parameters are consistent with experimental determinations (Lattimer & Lim 2013; Tews et al. 2013).”
PRODUCTION OF ALL THE r-PROCESS NUCLIDES IN THE DYNAMICAL EJECTA OF NEUTRON STAR MERGERS (2014, methodology): “This EOS gives the radius ≈12 km for a cold NS, which is in the range constrained from nuclear experiments, nuclear theory, and astrophysical observations, 10.7–13.1 km for a 1.4 M NS (Lattimer & Lim 2013).”
Unified equations of state for cold non-accreting neutron stars with Brussels-Montreal functionals. I. Role of symmetry energy (2018, background): “A comparison of BSk22, BSk24 and BSk25 shows the correlation between J and L that has been noted many times over the last forty years: see, for example, Farine, Pearson & Rouben (1978); Lattimer (2012); Lattimer & Lim (2013); Baldo & Burgio (2016).”
NEUTRON STAR MASSES AND RADII FROM QUIESCENT LOW-MASS X-RAY BINARIES (2013, background): “…in this analysis, which is below the expectations from nuclear experiments (although marginally overlapping the 90% confidence region reported by Lattimer & Lim (2013)), could be underestimated because it is possible that one or more of these QLMXB sources have helium, rather than hydrogen,…”
Unified equation of state for neutron stars on a microscopic basis (2015, background): “…values for Esym(n0) and L lie within the recent constraints derived from the analysis of different astrophysical observations (Newton et al. 2013; Steiner et al. 2010; Lattimer & Lim 2013; Hebeler et al. 2013) and nuclear experiments (Chen et al. 2010; Tsang et al. 2012; Viñas et al. 2014).”