Tidal Deformability of Quark Stars with Repulsive Interactions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the tidal deformability of quark stars using an updated QCD-based equation of state with repulsive interactions, aligning theoretical models with recent astrophysical data on massive pulsars.

Contribution

It introduces an improved quark star model incorporating repulsive interactions and compares it with recent observational data, refining the parameter space for such stars.

Findings

EOS compatible with recent pulsar data

Repulsive interactions are crucial for matching observations

Parameter window for quark star models is narrowed

Abstract

In an early work, we applied a QCD-based equation of state to the study of the stellar structure of self-bound strange stars, obtaining sequences with maximum masses larger than two solar masses and radii ranging from 8 to 12 Km. In this work, we update the previous calculations and compare them with the most recent data, including the very recent determination of the mass and radius of the massive pulsar PSR J0740+6620 performed by the NICER and XMM-Newton Collaborations. Our equation of state is similar to the MIT bag model one, but it includes repulsive interactions, which turn out to be essential to reproduce the accumulated experimental information. We find that our EOS is still compatible with all astrophysical observations but the parameter window is now narrower.