Stable configurations of hybrid stars with colour-flavour-locked core

TL;DR

This paper models hybrid stars with CFL quark matter cores, exploring their stability, mass-radius relationships, and potential observational signatures, revealing conditions under which third family stars may exist.

Contribution

It introduces detailed sequences of hybrid stars with CFL cores using specific equations of state, analyzing stability and mass limits, and identifying conditions for third family star configurations.

Findings

Hybrid stars can form third families or bifurcate from hadronic sequences.

Maximum mass of hybrid stars ranges from 1.0 to 2.1 solar masses.

Mass-shedding frequencies reach up to 2 kHz.

Abstract

We construct static and mass-shedding limit sequences of hybrid stars, composed of colour flavour locked (CFL) quark matter core, for a set of equations of state (EOSs). The EOS for the hadronic matter is obtained using appropriately calibrated extended field theoretical based relativistic mean-field model. The MIT bag model is employed to compute the EOSs of the CFL quark matter for different values of the CFL gap parameter in the range of $50 - 150\text{MeV}$ with the deconfinement phase transition density ranging from $4\rho_0 - 6\rho_0$ ($\rho_0 = 0.16\text{fm}^{-3}$). We find, depending on the values of the CFL gap parameter and the deconfinement phase transition density, the sequences of stable configurations of hybrid stars either form third families of the compact stars or bifurcate from the hadronic sequence. The hybrid stars have masses $1.0 - 2.1 M_\odot$ with radii $9 - 13.5$ km. The maximum values of mass shedding limit frequency for such hybrid stars are $1 -2$ kHz. For the smaller values of the CFL gap parameter and the deconfinement phase transition density, mass-radius relationships are in harmony with those deduced by applying improved hydrogen atmosphere model to fit the high quality spectra from compact star X7 in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. We observed for some cases that the third family of compact stars exist in the static sequence, but, disappear from the mass-shedding limit sequence. Our investigation suggests that the third family of compact stars in the mass-shedding limit sequence is more likely to appear, provided they have maximum mass in the static limit higher than their second family counterpart composed of pure hadronic matter.