Repulsive properties of hadrons in lattice QCD data and neutron stars

TL;DR

This paper refines a hadronic model using lattice QCD data to better understand the properties of hadrons and neutron stars, highlighting the importance of short-range repulsive interactions and their impact on the phase structure and neutron star characteristics.

Contribution

The study introduces a modified CMF model with smaller excluded volumes for certain hadrons, improving agreement with lattice QCD data and enabling a consistent hadronic description of QCD susceptibilities at high temperatures.

Findings

Hyperons have smaller effective volumes than non-strange baryons.

The improved model aligns well with lattice QCD data for susceptibilities.

Neutron star properties remain consistent with observations, with hyperons surviving at high densities.

Abstract

Second-order susceptibilities $\chi^{11}_{ij}$ of baryon, electric, and strangeness, $B$, $Q$, and $S$, charges, are calculated in the Chiral Mean Field (CMF) model and compared to available lattice QCD data. The susceptibilities are sensitive to the short range repulsive interactions between different hadron species, especially to the hardcore repulsion of hyperons. Decreasing the hyperons size, as compared to the size of the non-strange baryons, does improve significantly the agreement of the CMF model results with the Lattice QCD data. The electric charge-dependent susceptibilities are sensitive to the short range repulsive volume of mesons. The comparison with lattice QCD data suggests that strange baryons, non-strange mesons and strange mesons have significantly smaller excluded volumes than non-strange baryons. The CMF model with these modified hadron volumes allows for a mainly hadronic description of the QCD susceptibilities significantly above the chiral pseudo-critical temperature. This improved CMF model which is based on the lattice QCD data, has been used to study the properties of both cold QCD matter and neutron star matter. The phase structure in both cases is essentially unchanged, i.e. a chiral first-order phase transition occurs at low temperatures ($T_{\rm CP}\approx 17$ MeV), and hyperons survive deconfinement to higher densities than non-strange hadrons. The neutron star maximal mass remains close to 2.1$M_\odot$ and the mass-radius diagram is only modified slightly due to the appearance of hyperons and is in agreement with astrophysical observations.