Constraints on the symmetry energy using the mass-radius relation of neutron stars
By J. Lattimer, A. Steiner. 2014
225 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The nuclear symmetry energy is intimately connected with nuclear astrophysics. This contribution focuses on the estimation of the symmetry energy from experiment and how it is related to the structure of neutron stars. The most important connection is between the radii of neutron stars and the pressure of neutron star matter in the vicinity of the nuclear saturation density ns. This pressure is essentially controlled by the nuclear symmetry energy parameters Sv and L , the first two coefficients of a Taylor expansion of the symmetry energy around ns. We discuss constraints on these parameters that can be found from nuclear experiments. We demonstrate that these constraints are largely model-independent by deriving them qualitatively from a simple nuclear model. We also summarize how recent theoretical studies of pure neutron matter can reinforce these constraints. To date, several different astrophysical measurements of neutron star radii have been attempted. Attention is focused on photospheric radius expansion bursts and on thermal emissions from quiescent low-mass X-ray binaries. While none of these observations can, at the present time, determine individual neutron star radii to better than 20% accuracy, the body of observations can be used with Bayesian techniques to effectively constrain them to higher precision. These techniques invert the structure equations and obtain estimates of the pressure-density relation of neutron star matter, not only near ns, but up to the highest densities found in neutron star interiors. The estimates we derive for neutron star radii are in concordance with predictions from nuclear experiment and theory.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ccf329a9bf9e4f3db0b523f1beada81ac421d56
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Progress in Constraining Nuclear Symmetry Energy Using Neutron Star Observables Since GW170817 (2021, methodology): “4 M NS (it is the 68% confidence upper boundary from an earlier analysis of Chandra data [100] and very close to the Λ1.”
- Constraining the mass and radius of neutron stars in globular clusters (2017, methodology): “This method is superior to that employed in Lattimer & Steiner (2014b) because it allows us to quantitatively predict the posterior probability that any particular neutron star has a H or He atmosphere.”
- Unified equation of state for neutron stars on a microscopic basis (2015, methodology): “For completeness, we also display in the orange hatched band the probability distribution for MG and R deduced from five PRE (Photospheric Radius Expansion) burst sources and five QLMXB sources, after a Bayesian analysis (Lattimer & Steiner 2014a).”
- Combined Constraints on the Equation of State of Dense Neutron-rich Matter from Terrestrial Nuclear Experiments and Observations of Neutron Stars (2018, unknown): “(Lattimer & Steiner 2014).”
- THE DENSE MATTER EQUATION OF STATE FROM NEUTRON STAR RADIUS AND MASS MEASUREMENTS (2015, methodology): “…more recent parametric forms of the equation of state that do not rely on particular nuclear physics models (e.g., Read et al. 2009; Özel & Psaltis 2009; Steiner et al. 2010; Lattimer & Steiner 2014b) allow us to put this inversion into practice even without sampling the entire mass-radius curve.”
- Neutron star mass and radius measurements from atmospheric model fits to X-ray burst cooling tail spectra (2017, background): “The masses and radii of neutron stars (NSs) encode valuable information about the properties of the matter in their cores (Lattimer 2012; Lattimer & Steiner 2014), which reaches several times nuclear saturation density and has strong isospin asymmetry, and which therefore cannot be analyzed in…”