Vector interaction enhanced bag model for astrophysical applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extended bag model incorporating chiral symmetry breaking and vector interactions, providing a more realistic description of quark matter for astrophysical applications, especially neutron star modeling.

Contribution

It presents a novel extension of the thermodynamic bag model that explicitly includes chiral symmetry breaking and vector interactions, derived from NJL and Dyson-Schwinger frameworks.

Findings

The model shows how chiral and deconfinement transitions occur in dense matter.

It suggests that stable strange matter is unlikely without considering chiral symmetry breaking.

The approach constrains neutron star maximum masses to about 2 solar masses.

Abstract

For quark matter studies in astrophysics the thermodynamic bag model (tdBAG) has been widely used. Despite its success it fails to account for various phenomena expected from Quantum-Chromo-Dynamics (QCD). We suggest a straightforward extension of tdBAG in order to take the dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry and the influence of vector interactions explicitly into account. As for tdBAG the model mimics confinement in a phenomenological approach. It is based on an analysis of the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model at finite density. Furthermore, we demonstrate how NJL and bag models in this regime follow from the more general and QCD based framework of Dyson-Schwinger (DS) equations in medium by assuming a simple gluon contact interaction. Based on our simple and novel model, we construct quark hadron hybrid equations of state (EoS) and study systematically chiral and deconfinement phase transitions, the appearance of $s$-quarks and the role of vector interaction. We further study these aspects for matter in beta-equilibrium at zero temperature, with particular focus on the current ~2 solar masses maximum mass constraint for neutron stars. Our approach indicates that the currently only theoretical evidence for the hypothesis of stable strange matter is an artifact of tdBAG and results from neglecting the dynamical breaking of chiral symmetry.