Investigating Signatures of Phase Transitions in Neutron-Star Cores
arXiv:2112.08157 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevC.107.025801
Abstract
Neutron stars explore matter at the highest densities in the universe such that their inner cores might undergo a phase transition from hadronic to exotic phases, e.g., quark matter. Such a transition could be associated with non-trivial structures in the density behavior of the speed of sound such as jumps and sharp peaks. Here, we employ a physics-agnostic approach to model the density dependence of the speed of sound in neutron stars and study to what extent the existence of non-trivial structures can be inferred from existing astrophysical observations of neutron stars. For this, we exhaustively study different equations of state, including as well those with explicit first-order phase transitions. We obtain a large number of different EoSs which reproduce the same astrophysical observations and obey the same physical constraints such as mechanical stability and causality. Among them, some have non-trivial structures in the sound speed while others do not. We conclude that astrophysical information to date do not require the existence of a phase transition to quark matter in the density range explored in the core of neutron stars.
8 pages, 5 figures. Comments welcome
References in corpus (27)
- GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
- Shapiro delay measurement of a two solar mass neutron star
- A Massive Pulsar in a Compact Relativistic Binary
- Multi-messenger Observations of a Binary Neutron Star Merger
- Gravitational Waves and Gamma-rays from a Binary Neutron Star Merger: GW170817 and GRB 170817A
- GW190814: Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of a 23 M Black Hole with a 2.6 M Compact Object
- PSR J0030+0451 Mass and Radius from NICER Data and Implications for the Properties of Neutron Star Matter
- A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Millisecond Pulsar Parameter Estimation
- A NICER View of the Massive Pulsar PSR J0740+6620 Informed by Radio Timing and XMM-Newton Spectroscopy
- Refined Mass and Geometric Measurements of the High-Mass PSR J0740+6620
- Neutron-star radius constraints from GW170817 and future detections
- Impact of the PSR J0740+6620 radius constraint on the properties of high-density matter
- How perturbative QCD constrains the Equation of State at Neutron-Star densities
- Neutron Star Equation of State in light of GW190814
- Soft interactions in cold quark matter
- Quarkyonic Matter Equation of State in Beta-Equilibrium
- On the nature of GW190814 and its impact on the understanding of supranuclear matter
- Combining Electromagnetic and Gravitational-Wave Constraints on Neutron-Star Masses and Radii
- Phase transitions in dense matter and the maximum mass of neutron stars
- Extreme Matter meets Extreme Gravity: Ultra-heavy neutron stars with crossovers and first-order phase transitions
- Discriminating between Neutron Stars and Black Holes with Imperfect Knowledge of the Maximum Neutron Star Mass
- Twin stars and the stiffness of the nuclear equation of state: ruling out strong phase transitions below with the new NICER radius measurements
- Excluded-volume model for quarkyonic Matter: Three-flavor baryon-quark Mixture
- Quarkyonic stars with isospin-flavor asymmetry
- Finite-Temperature Quarkyonic Matter with an Excluded Volume Model
- The Radius of PSR J0740+6620 from NICER and XMM-Newton Data
- Mass and radius relations of quarkyonic stars using an excluded volume model
Cited by in corpus (38)
- Evidence against a strong first-order phase transition in neutron star cores: impact of new data
- Equation of state and speed of sound of isospin-asymmetric QCD on the lattice
- Perturbative QCD and the Neutron Star Equation of State
- Constraints on strong phase transitions in neutron stars
- Bayesian uncertainty quantification of perturbative QCD input to the neutron-star equation of state
- Low-energy nuclear physics and global neutron star properties
- Dense Matter in Neutron Stars with eXTP
- Constraints on Phase Transitions in Neutron Star Matter
- Decoding Neutron Star Observations: Revealing Composition through Bayesian Neural Networks
- Central Speed of Sound, Trace Anomaly and Observables of Neutron Stars from Perturbative Analyses of Scaled TOV Equations
- Unified neutron star equations of state calibrated to nuclear properties
- Curvature of the energy per particle in neutron stars
- How the QCD trace anomaly behaves at the core of twin stars?
- Constraining first-order phase transition inside neutron stars with application of Bayesian techniques on PSR J0437-4715 NICER data
- Novel Scalings of Neutron Star Properties from Analyzing Dimensionless Tolman--Oppenheimer--Volkoff Equations
- Prospect of unraveling the first-order phase transition in neutron stars with and modes
- Gravitational-wave imprints of non-convex dynamics in binary neutron star mergers
- Strong Gravity Extruding Peaks in Speed of Sound Profiles of Massive Neutron Stars
- Exploring pathways to forming twin stars
- On the nature of compact stars determined by gravitational waves, radio-astronomy, x-ray emission and nuclear physics
- Inferring three-nucleon couplings from multi-messenger neutron-star observations
- Relativistic Hartree-Fock Chiral Lagrangians with confinement, nucleon finite size and short-range effects
- Neutron-quark stars: Discerning viable alternatives for the higher-density part of the equation of state of compact stars
- Unraveling Trace Anomaly of Supradense Matter via Neutron Star Compactness Scaling
- Detecting Hyperons in neutron stars -- a machine learning approach
- New Insights into Supradense Matter from Dissecting Scaled Stellar Structure Equations
- Effects of phase transition in hybrid stars from quark-meson coupling hadronic matter to deconfined quark matter
- Neutron Star Radii from Laboratory Experiments
- Microscopic constraints for the equation of state and structure of neutron stars: a Bayesian model mixing framework
- Effective Field Theories for Neutron Stars Physics
- Direct Inference of Nuclear Equation-of-State Parameters from Gravitational-Wave Observations
- Can Neutron Star Tidal Effects Obscure Deviations from General Relativity?
- Effects of Nontrivial Topology on Neutron Star Rotation and its Potential Observational Implications
- Effects of a Brueckner-Hartree-Fock-corrected effective mass on speed of sound, conformality, and observables of dark matter-admixed neutron stars
- Is The Trace Anomaly at its Minimum Value at Neutron Star Centers?
- Topological Shell Structures in Neutron Stars: Effects on Equilibrium, Oscillations, and Gravitational-Wave Signatures
- Constraining Hamiltonians from chiral effective field theory with neutron-star data
- Astrometric microlensing probes of the isolated neutron star population with Roman