Cooling of quark stars from perturbative QCD

TL;DR

This study models the thermal evolution of quark stars using perturbative QCD, showing that bare quark stars cool too quickly to match observations, while those with a crust align better with data.

Contribution

It introduces a perturbative QCD-based equation of state for quark stars and compares the cooling behaviors of bare and crusted configurations.

Findings

Bare quark stars cool too rapidly to match observed luminosities.

Crusted quark stars exhibit slower cooling and better observational agreement.

Cooling predictions for bare stars become more uncertain after about one year.

Abstract

We investigate the thermal evolution of quark stars with and without a hadronic crust using an equation of state derived from perturbative QCD that incorporates the running of the strong coupling and the strange quark mass. Our analysis reveals that bare quark stars cool too rapidly to match the luminosity data, including those of the coldest observed isolated neutron stars, even when the uncertainty from the renormalization scale is taken into account. In contrast, configurations featuring a hadronic crust exhibit slower cooling and improved agreement with observational data. We also observe that the cooling band for bare quark stars narrows significantly after $t \sim 1$ year, whereas the configurations with a crust exhibit a larger uncertainty throughout their time evolution.