Lepton-rich cold QCD matter in protoneutron stars

TL;DR

This paper explores the properties of lepton-rich cold QCD matter in protoneutron stars using advanced perturbative equations, examining the effects of trapped neutrinos and the stability of strange quark matter.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the equation of state for lepton-rich QCD matter and investigates quark matter nucleation in protoneutron stars, including uncertainty estimates.

Findings

Stable strange quark matter has a restricted parameter space.

Presence of trapped neutrinos modifies the equation of state.

Uncertainty in observables is quantified via renormalization scale dependence.

Abstract

We investigate protoneutron star matter using the state-of-the-art perturbative equation of state for cold and dense QCD in the presence of a fixed lepton fraction in which both electrons and neutrinos are included. Besides computing the modifications in the equation of state due to the presence of trapped neutrinos, we show that stable strange quark matter has a more restricted parameter space. We also study the possibility of nucleation of unpaired quark matter in the core of protoneutron stars by matching the lepton-rich QCD pressure onto a hadronic equation of state, namely TM1 with trapped neutrinos. Using the inherent dependence of perturbative QCD on the renormalization scale parameter, we provide a measure of the uncertainty in the observables we compute.