Neutron star equation of state: QMF modeling and applications

TL;DR

This paper reviews the quark mean-field (QMF) model's application to understanding the neutron star equation of state, integrating nuclear physics, hypernuclei, phase transitions, and astrophysical observations to advance dense matter research.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of the QMF model and extends its applications to hypernuclei, phase transitions, and astrophysical phenomena, connecting theory with observations.

Findings

QMF model effectively describes nuclear matter and neutron stars.

Constraints on interquark interactions from gravitational wave data.

Insights into hyperon matter and hadron-quark phase transition.

Abstract

Because of the development of many-body theories of nuclear matter, the long-standing, open problem of the equation of state (EOS) of dense matter may be understood in the near future through the confrontation of theoretical calculations with laboratory measurements of nuclear properties \& reactions and increasingly accurate observations in astronomy. In this review, we focus on the following six aspects: 1) providing a survey of the quark mean-field (QMF) model, which consistently describes a nucleon and many-body nucleonic system from a quark potential; 2) applying QMF to both nuclear matter and neutron stars; 3) extending QMF formalism to the description of hypernuclei and hyperon matter, as well as hyperon stars; 4) exploring the hadron-quark phase transition and hybrid stars by combining the QMF model with the quark matter model characterized by the sound speed; 5) constraining interquark interactions through both the gravitational wave signals and electromagnetic signals of binary merger event GW170817; and 6) discussing further opportunities to study dense matter EOS from compact objects, such as neutron star cooling and pulsar glitches.