Chiral pasta

Abstract

Interiors of neutron stars are ultra-dense and may contain a core of deconfined quark matter. Such a core connects to the outer layers smoothly or through a sharp microscopic interface or through an intermediate macroscopic layer of inhomogeneous mixed phases, which is globally neutral but locally contains electrically charged domains. Here I employ a nucleon-meson model under neutron star conditions that shows a first-order chiral phase transition at large densities. In the vicinity of this chiral transition I calculate the free energies of various mixed phases - different 'pasta structures' - in the Wigner-Seitz approximation. Crucially, chirally broken nuclear matter and the approximately chirally symmetric phase (loosely interpreted as quark matter) are treated on the same footing. This allows me to compute the interface profiles of bubbles, rods, and slabs fully consistently, taking into account electromagnetic screening effects and without needing the surface tension as an input. I find that the full numerical results tend to disfavor mixed phases compared to a simple step-like approximation used frequently in the literature and that the predominantly favored pasta structure consists of slabs with a surface tension $\Sigma \simeq 6\mathrm{MeV}/{\mathrm{fm}}^2$.

arXiv comment19 pages, 8 figures; v2: minor improvements in the text, one reference added, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Building a realistic neutron star from holography
• Holographic quarkyonic matter
• Framework for phase transitions between the Maxwell and Gibbs constructions
• A Bayesian analysis of the properties of hybrid stars with the NJL model
• Quark-hadron pasta phase in neutron stars: the role of medium-dependent surface and curvature tensions
• SU(3) parity doubling in cold neutron star matter
• Comparison of different relativistic models applied to dense nuclear matter
• Framework for phase transitions between the Maxwell and Gibbs constructions at finite temperature
• A holographic study on QCD phase transition and neutron star properties
• Bubble dynamics in the Polyakov quark-meson model
• Role of thermal fluctuations in nucleation of three-flavor quark matter
• Isentropic hybrid stars in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model: effects of neutrino trapping
• Chiral restoration of strange baryons