Astrophysical implications of gapless color-flavor locked quark matter: A hot water bottle for aging neutron stars
- Physics Department, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130 (United States)
- Charles W. Flanagan High School, Pembroke Pines, Florida 33029 (United States)
- Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742 (United States)
The gapless color-flavor locked (gCFL) phase is a candidate for the second-densest phase of matter in the QCD phase diagram, making it a plausible constituent of the core of neutron stars. We show that even a relatively small region of gCFL matter in a star will dominate both the heat capacity C{sub V} and the heat loss by neutrino emission L{sub {nu}}. The gCFL phase is characterized by an unusual quasiparticle dispersion relation that makes both its specific heat c{sub V} and its neutrino emissivity {epsilon}{sub {nu}} parametrically larger than in any other phase of nuclear or quark matter. During the epoch in which the cooling of the star is dominated by direct Urca neutrino emission, the presence of a gCFL region does not strongly alter the cooling history because the enhancements of C{sub V} and L{sub {nu}} cancel against each other. At late times, however, the cooling is dominated by photon emission from the surface, so L{sub {nu}} is irrelevant, and the anomalously large heat capacity of the gCFL region keeps the star warm. The temperature drops with time as T{approx}t{sup -1.4} rather than the canonical T{approx}t{sup -5}. This provides a unique and potentially observable signature of gCFL quark matter.
- OSTI ID:
- 20709456
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 71, Issue 11; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.71.114011; (c) 2005 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0556-2821
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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