Strangeness in Neutron Stars

Abstract

It is generally agreed on that the tremendous densities reached in the centers of neutron stars provide a high-pressure environment in which several intriguing particles processes may compete with each other. These range from the generation of hyperons to quark deconfinement to the formation of kaon condensates and H-matter. There are theoretical suggestions of even more exotic processes inside neutron stars, such as the formation of absolutely stable strange quark matter. In the latter event, neutron stars would be largely composed of strange quark matter possibly enveloped in a thin nuclear crust. This paper gives a brief overview of these striking physical possibilities with an emphasis on the role played by strangeness in neutron star matter, which constitutes compressed baryonic matter at ultra-high baryon number density but low temperature which is no accessible to relativistic heavy ion collision experiments.

16 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables; Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Astronomy and Relativistic Astrophysics (IWARA) 2005, Int. J. Mod. Phys. D

References in corpus (27)

• Strange Quark Matter and Compact Stars
• Color superconducting quark matter
• Crystalline Color Superconductivity
• Enforced Electrical Neutrality of the Color-Flavor Locked Phase
• Kaon production in heavy ion reactions at intermediate energies
• Evidence for a Soft Nuclear Equation-of-State from Kaon Production in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Electrically charged compact stars and formation of charged black holes
• Composition, Structure and Evolution of Neutron Stars with Kaon Condensates
• Kaons in dense matter, kaon production in heavy-ion collisions, and kaon condensation in neutron stars
• Electric fields at the quark surface of strange stars in the color-flavor locked phase
• High Density Quark Matter under Stress
• Physics and Astrophysics of Strange Quark Matter
• Signal of Quark Deconfinement in the Timing Structure of Pulsar Spin-Down
• Kaon production in heavy-ion collisions and maximum mass of neutron stars
• Quark Hadron Continuity in QCD with one Flavor
• Color-flavor locked strangelets
• Evidence for a New State of Matter: An Assessment of the Results from the CERN Lead Beam Programme
• Color Superconductivity in Compact Stars
• Nuclear Matter with a Bose Condensate of Dibaryons in Relativistic Mean-Field Theory
• Possible evidence of quark matter in neutron star X-ray binaries
• Neutron Star Constraints on the H Dibaryon
• Spin-down of Relativistic Stars with Phase Transitions and PSR J0537-6910
• Constraints to Coupling Constants of the Omega- and Sigma-Mesons with Dibaryons
• Gaps below strange star crusts
• The interaction between H-dibaryons
• Strange mesons in dense nuclear matter
• Spin-up of the hyperon-softened accreting neutron stars

Cited by in corpus (5)

• K${}^{-}$ multi-nucleon absorption cross sections and branching ratios in $\Lambda$p and ${\Sigma }^0$p final states
• Probing Strange Stars with Advanced Gravitational Wave Detectors
• Binding energy of ${}_{\Lambda }^3\mathrm{H}$ and ${}_{\Lambda }^4\mathrm{H}$ via image analyses of nuclear emulsions using deep-learning
• Toward a Unified Understanding of the Dense Matter Equation of State
• $f$-mode Oscillations for Hyperons and H-dibaryons in Neutron Stars