Crustal failure as a tool to probe hybrid stars

TL;DR

This paper explores how crust-breaking phenomena in hybrid stars can reveal details about their internal quark-hadron structure, with implications for gravitational wave detection and understanding phase transitions in neutron stars.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of crust-breaking frequencies and ellipticities in hybrid stars, linking observable signals to their internal microphysics and phase transition characteristics.

Findings

Crust-breaking frequency scales linearly with star mass.

Maximum ellipticity can increase significantly with a liquid quark core.

Crust-breaking properties are sensitive to the quark-hadron density jump.

Abstract

It is currently unknown if neutron stars (NSs) are composed of nucleons only or are hybrid stars, i.e., in addition to nucleonic crusts and outer cores, they also possess quark cores. Quantum chromodynamics allows for such a possibility, but accurate calculations relevant for compact stars are still elusive. Here we investigate some crust-breaking aspects of hybrid stars. We show that the crust-breaking frequency and maximum fiducial ellipticity are sensitive to the quark-hadron density jump and equation of state stiffness. Remarkably, the crust-breaking frequency related to static tides scales linearly with the mass of the star (for a given companion's mass), and its slope encompasses information about the microphysics of the star. However, for precise crust-breaking frequency predictions, relativistic corrections to Kepler's third law and the Newtonian tidal field should not be ignored. When a liquid quark core touches an elastic hadronic phase (the result of a significant energy-density jump), the maximum ellipticity can increase around an order of magnitude when compared to a liquid quark core touching a liquid hadronic phase. That is relevant because it would increase the odds of detecting continuous gravitational waves from NSs. Our order-of-magnitude analysis also suggests that a given upper limit to the ellipticity(crust-breaking frequency) could have representatives in stars with either small or intermediate(large) energy-density jumps. Therefore, when upper limits to the ellipticity for isolated stars are better constrained or electromagnetic radiation (e.g., gamma-ray precursors) is detected along with gravitational waves in inspiraling binary systems, they may help constrain some aspects of phase transitions in NSs.