Early deconfinement of asymptotically conformal color-superconducting quark matter in neutron stars

Abstract

We present a relativistic density functional approach to color superconducting quark matter that mimics quark confinement by a fast growth of the quasiparticle selfenergy in the confining region. The approach is shown to be equivalent to a chiral model of quark matter with medium dependent couplings. While the (pseudo)scalar sector of the model is fitted to the vacuum phenomenology of quantum chromodynamics, the strength of interaction in the vector and diquark channels is varied in order to provide the best agreement with the observational constraints on the mass-radius relation and tidal deformability of neutron stars modelled with our approach. In order to recover the conformal behavior of quark matter at asymptotically high densities we introduce a medium dependence of the vector and diquark couplings motivated by the nonperturbative gluon exchange. Our analysis signals that the onset of deconfinement to color superconducting quark matter is likely to occur in neutron stars with masses below 1.0 $M_{\odot }$.

8 pages, 4 figuures, Contribution to Proceedings of Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum XV, August 1-6, 2022, Stavanger, Norway

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Effect of color superconductivity on the mass of hybrid neutron stars in an effective model with pQCD asymptotics
• Role of thermal fluctuations in nucleation of three-flavor quark matter