Evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars
Abstract
The theory governing the strong nuclear force—quantum chromodynamics—predicts that at sufficiently high energy densities, hadronic nuclear matter undergoes a deconfinement transition to a new phase of quarks and gluons. Although this has been observed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, it is currently an open question whether quark matter exists inside neutron stars. By combining astrophysical observations and theoretical ab initio calculations in a model-independent way, we find that the inferred properties of matter in the cores of neutron stars with mass corresponding to 1.4 solar masses (M⊙) are compatible with nuclear model calculations. However, the matter in the interior of maximally massive stable neutron stars exhibits characteristics of the deconfined phase, which we interpret as evidence for the presence of quark-matter cores. For the heaviest reliably observed neutron stars with mass M ≈ 2M⊙, the presence of quark matter is found to be linked to the behaviour of the speed of sound cs in strongly interacting matter. If the conformal bound $${c}_{\rm{s}}^{2}\le 1/3$$ is not strongly violated, massive neutron stars are predicted to have sizable quark-matter cores. This finding has important implications for the phenomenology of neutron stars and affects the dynamics of neutron star mergers with at least one sufficiently massive participant.
- Authors:
-
- Univ. of Helsinki (Finland). Helsinki Inst. of Physics
- Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (United States)
- European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva (Switzerland); Univ. of Stavanger, Stavanger (Norway)
- Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States). Columbia Astrophysics Lab.; Flatiron Inst., New York, NY (United States). Center for Computational Astrophysics; KTH Royal Inst. of Technology, Stockholm (Sweden); Stockholm Univ. (Sweden)
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP); European Research Council (ERC); Academy of Finland
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1774074
- Grant/Contract Number:
- SC0007984; 725369; 1322507
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- Nature Physics
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 16; Journal Issue: 9; Journal ID: ISSN 1745-2473
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group (NPG)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS; 79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
Citation Formats
Annala, Eemeli, Gorda, Tyler, Kurkela, Aleksi, Nättilä, Joonas, and Vuorinen, Aleksi. Evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars. United States: N. p., 2020.
Web. doi:10.1038/s41567-020-0914-9.
Annala, Eemeli, Gorda, Tyler, Kurkela, Aleksi, Nättilä, Joonas, & Vuorinen, Aleksi. Evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars. United States. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0914-9
Annala, Eemeli, Gorda, Tyler, Kurkela, Aleksi, Nättilä, Joonas, and Vuorinen, Aleksi. Mon .
"Evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars". United States. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0914-9. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1774074.
@article{osti_1774074,
title = {Evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars},
author = {Annala, Eemeli and Gorda, Tyler and Kurkela, Aleksi and Nättilä, Joonas and Vuorinen, Aleksi},
abstractNote = {The theory governing the strong nuclear force—quantum chromodynamics—predicts that at sufficiently high energy densities, hadronic nuclear matter undergoes a deconfinement transition to a new phase of quarks and gluons. Although this has been observed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, it is currently an open question whether quark matter exists inside neutron stars. By combining astrophysical observations and theoretical ab initio calculations in a model-independent way, we find that the inferred properties of matter in the cores of neutron stars with mass corresponding to 1.4 solar masses (M⊙) are compatible with nuclear model calculations. However, the matter in the interior of maximally massive stable neutron stars exhibits characteristics of the deconfined phase, which we interpret as evidence for the presence of quark-matter cores. For the heaviest reliably observed neutron stars with mass M ≈ 2M⊙, the presence of quark matter is found to be linked to the behaviour of the speed of sound cs in strongly interacting matter. If the conformal bound ${c}_{\rm{s}}^{2}\le 1/3$ is not strongly violated, massive neutron stars are predicted to have sizable quark-matter cores. This finding has important implications for the phenomenology of neutron stars and affects the dynamics of neutron star mergers with at least one sufficiently massive participant.},
doi = {10.1038/s41567-020-0914-9},
journal = {Nature Physics},
number = 9,
volume = 16,
place = {United States},
year = {Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2020},
month = {Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2020}
}
Works referenced in this record:
New forms of QCD matter discovered at RHIC
journal, March 2005
- Gyulassy, Miklos; McLerran, Larry
- Nuclear Physics A, Vol. 750, Issue 1
New Constraints on Radii and Tidal Deformabilities of Neutron Stars from GW170817
journal, June 2018
- Most, Elias R.; Weih, Lukas R.; Rezzolla, Luciano
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 120, Issue 26
Equation of state sensitivities when inferring neutron star and dense matter properties
journal, March 2019
- Greif, S. K.; Raaijmakers, G.; Hebeler, K.
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 485, Issue 4
Spectral representations of neutron-star equations of state
journal, November 2010
- Lindblom, Lee
- Physical Review D, Vol. 82, Issue 10
A Massive Pulsar in a Compact Relativistic Binary
journal, April 2013
- Antoniadis, J.; Freire, P. C. C.; Wex, N.
- Science, Vol. 340, Issue 6131
Maximum mass and radius of neutron stars, and the nuclear symmetry energy
journal, March 2012
- Gandolfi, S.; Carlson, J.; Reddy, Sanjay
- Physical Review C, Vol. 85, Issue 3
GW170817: Measurements of Neutron Star Radii and Equation of State
journal, October 2018
- Abbott, B. P.; Abbott, R.; Abbott, T. D.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 121, Issue 16
Gravitational-Wave Constraints on the Neutron-Star-Matter Equation of State
journal, April 2018
- Annala, Eemeli; Gorda, Tyler; Kurkela, Aleksi
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 120, Issue 17
Constraining the Speed of Sound inside Neutron Stars with Chiral Effective Field Theory Interactions and Observations
journal, June 2018
- Tews, I.; Carlson, J.; Gandolfi, S.
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 860, Issue 2
Quantum Monte Carlo calculation of the equation of state of neutron matter
journal, May 2009
- Gandolfi, S.; Illarionov, A. Yu.; Schmidt, K. E.
- Physical Review C, Vol. 79, Issue 5
The Equation of State from Observed Masses and Radii of Neutron Stars
journal, September 2010
- Steiner, Andrew W.; Lattimer, James M.; Brown, Edward F.
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 722, Issue 1
Neutron Star Structure and the Equation of State
journal, March 2001
- Lattimer, J. M.; Prakash, M.
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 550, Issue 1
Constraining the mass and radius of neutron stars in globular clusters
journal, January 2018
- Steiner, A. W.; Heinke, C. O.; Bogdanov, S.
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 476, Issue 1
Equation of state in ( )-flavor QCD
journal, November 2014
- Bazavov, A.; Bhattacharya, Tanmoy; DeTar, C.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 90, Issue 9
Equation of state constraints for the cold dense matter inside neutron stars using the cooling tail method
journal, June 2016
- Nättilä, J.; Steiner, A. W.; Kajava, J. J. E.
- Astronomy & Astrophysics, Vol. 591
Identifying a First-Order Phase Transition in Neutron-Star Mergers through Gravitational Waves
journal, February 2019
- Bauswein, Andreas; Bastian, Niels-Uwe F.; Blaschke, David B.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 122, Issue 6
Relativistic effective interaction for nuclei, giant resonances, and neutron stars
journal, November 2010
- Fattoyev, F. J.; Horowitz, C. J.; Piekarewicz, J.
- Physical Review C, Vol. 82, Issue 5
Constraining Neutron star Matter with Quantum Chromodynamics
journal, June 2014
- Kurkela, Aleksi; Fraga, Eduardo S.; Schaffner-Bielich, Jürgen
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 789, Issue 2
Equation of State and Neutron star Properties Constrained by Nuclear Physics and Observation
journal, July 2013
- Hebeler, K.; Lattimer, J. M.; Pethick, C. J.
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 773, Issue 1
Decoding the phase structure of QCD via particle production at high energy
journal, September 2018
- Andronic, Anton; Braun-Munzinger, Peter; Redlich, Krzysztof
- Nature, Vol. 561, Issue 7723
Neutron Matter at Next-to-Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order in Chiral Effective Field Theory
journal, January 2013
- Tews, I.; Krüger, T.; Hebeler, K.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 110, Issue 3
Full result for the QCD equation of state with <mml:math altimg="si1.gif" overflow="scroll" xmlns:xocs="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/xocs/dtd" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/ja/dtd" xmlns:ja="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/ja/dtd" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:tb="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/table/dtd" xmlns:sb="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/struct-bib/dtd" xmlns:ce="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/dtd" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:cals="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/cals/dtd" xmlns:sa="http://www.elsevier.com/xml/common/struct-aff/dtd"><mml:mn>2</mml:mn><mml:mo>+</mml:mo><mml:mn>1</mml:mn></mml:math> flavors
journal, March 2014
- Borsányi, Szabolcs; Fodor, Zoltán; Hoelbling, Christian
- Physics Letters B, Vol. 730
The radius of the quiescent neutron star in the globular cluster M13
journal, March 2018
- Shaw, A. W.; Heinke, C. O.; Steiner, A. W.
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 476, Issue 4
New Neutron Star Equation of State with Quark–Hadron Crossover
journal, October 2019
- Baym, Gordon; Furusawa, Shun; Hatsuda, Tetsuo
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 885, Issue 1
Next-to-Next-to-Next-to-Leading Order Pressure of Cold Quark Matter: Leading Logarithm
journal, November 2018
- Gorda, Tyler; Kurkela, Aleksi; Romatschke, Paul
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 121, Issue 20
The nuclear symmetry energy in relativistic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock calculations
journal, December 1987
- Müther, H.; Prakash, M.; Ainsworth, T. L.
- Physics Letters B, Vol. 199, Issue 4
GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
journal, October 2017
- Abbott, B. P.; Abbott, R.; Abbott, T. D.
- Physical Review Letters, Vol. 119, Issue 16
Bound on the speed of sound from holography
journal, September 2009
- Cherman, Aleksey; Cohen, Thomas D.; Nellore, Abhinav
- Physical Review D, Vol. 80, Issue 6
Measurement of the Radius of Neutron Stars with high Signal-To-Noise Quiescent Low-Mass X-Ray Binaries in Globular Clusters
journal, June 2013
- Guillot, Sebastien; Servillat, Mathieu; Webb, Natalie A.
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 772, Issue 1
Relativistic Shapiro delay measurements of an extremely massive millisecond pulsar
journal, September 2019
- Cromartie, H. T.; Fonseca, E.; Ransom, S. M.
- Nature Astronomy
Composition and thermodynamics of nuclear matter with light clusters
journal, January 2010
- Typel, S.; Röpke, G.; Klähn, T.
- Physical Review C, Vol. 81, Issue 1
Constraining the hadron-quark phase transition chemical potential via astronomical observation
conference, January 2019
- Bai, Zhan; Liu, Yu-Xin
- XIAMEN-CUSTIPEN WORKSHOP ON THE EQUATION OF STATE OF DENSE NEUTRON-RICH MATTER IN THE ERA OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVE ASTRONOMY, AIP Conference Proceedings
Quantum chromodynamics and the theory of superdense matter
journal, May 1980
- Shuryak, Edward V.
- Physics Reports, Vol. 61, Issue 2
Neutron Stars 1
book, January 2007
- Haensel, P.; Potekhin, A. Y.; Yakovlev, D. G.
- Astrophysics and Space Science Library
Neutron star mass and radius measurements from atmospheric model fits to X-ray burst cooling tail spectra
journal, December 2017
- Nättilä, J.; Miller, M. C.; Steiner, A. W.
- Astronomy & Astrophysics, Vol. 608
The Dense Matter Equation of State from Neutron star Radius and mass Measurements
journal, March 2016
- Özel, Feryal; Psaltis, Dimitrios; Güver, Tolga
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 820, Issue 1
Interacting Quark Matter Equation of State for Compact Stars
journal, January 2014
- Fraga, Eduardo S.; Kurkela, Aleksi; Vuorinen, Aleksi
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 781, Issue 2
Equation of state of nucleon matter and neutron star structure
journal, September 1998
- Akmal, A.; Pandharipande, V. R.; Ravenhall, D. G.
- Physical Review C, Vol. 58, Issue 3
Core-Collapse Supernova Equations of State Based on Neutron star Observations
journal, August 2013
- Steiner, A. W.; Hempel, M.; Fischer, T.
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 774, Issue 1
Cold quark matter
journal, May 2010
- Kurkela, Aleksi; Romatschke, Paul; Vuorinen, Aleksi
- Physical Review D, Vol. 81, Issue 10
Neutron star Mass–Radius Constraints of the Quiescent Low-Mass X-Ray Binaries x7 and x5 in the Globular Cluster 47 tuc
journal, November 2016
- Bogdanov, Slavko; Heinke, Craig O.; Özel, Feryal
- The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 831, Issue 2
Constraints on a phenomenologically parametrized neutron-star equation of state
journal, June 2009
- Read, Jocelyn S.; Lackey, Benjamin D.; Owen, Benjamin J.
- Physical Review D, Vol. 79, Issue 12
Neutron star radii and crusts: Uncertainties and unified equations of state
journal, September 2016
- Fortin, M.; Providência, C.; Raduta, Ad. R.
- Physical Review C, Vol. 94, Issue 3
Critical examination of constraints on the equation of state of dense matter obtained from GW170817
journal, October 2018
- Tews, I.; Margueron, J.; Reddy, S.
- Physical Review C, Vol. 98, Issue 4
A two-solar-mass neutron star measured using Shapiro delay
journal, October 2010
- Demorest, P. B.; Pennucci, T.; Ransom, S. M.
- Nature, Vol. 467, Issue 7319
Density-dependent effective nucleon-nucleon interaction from chiral three-nucleon forces
journal, February 2010
- Holt, J. W.; Kaiser, N.; Weise, W.
- Physical Review C, Vol. 81, Issue 2
Causal representations of neutron-star equations of state
journal, June 2018
- Lindblom, Lee
- Physical Review D, Vol. 97, Issue 12