Deconfinement phase transition and quark condensate in compact stars

TL;DR

This paper explores the deconfinement phase transition in compact stars, modeling nuclear and quark matter, and finds that quark cores are small and nonperturbative effects are significant at high densities.

Contribution

It systematically models the phase transition and quark condensate in compact stars, integrating observational constraints to support the existence of quark cores in massive stars.

Findings

Quark cores are small and absent in stars with less than 2 solar masses.

The quark condensate decreases nonlinearly with density at moderate densities.

Significant nonperturbative effects persist at high densities in quark matter.

Abstract

We investigate systematically the possible deconfinement phase transition from nuclear matter to quark matter in compact stars. The properties of nuclear matter are fixed by expanding its binding energy to the order of $\rho^3$, while those of quark matter are predicted by an equivparticle model. The Maxwell construction is then applied for the quark-hadron mixed phase. By confronting compact star structures with pulsar observations, we obtain several EOSs that are compatible with the latest observations while supporting quark cores inside the most massive stars. It is found that the quark core is rather small and does not emerge for compact stars with $M\lesssim 2M_\odot$. The in-medium quark condensate of the stellar matter in those stars are then extracted within the framework of an equivparticle model, which decreases nonlinearly with density. At larger densities with pure quark matter, the quark condensate is still large and does not necessary decrease with density, indicating significant nonperturbative contributions within the density regions covered by compact stars.