We study the structure of protoneutron stars within the finite-temperature Brueckner-Bethe-Goldstone theoretical approach, paying particular attention to how it is joined to a low-density nuclear equation of state (EOS). We find a slight sensitivity of the minimum value of the protoneutron star mass on the low-density equation of state, whereas the maximum mass is hardly affected.
We study the structure of hadronic protoneutron stars within the finite temperature Brueckner-Bethe-Goldstone theoretical approach. Assuming beta-equilibrated nuclear matter with nucleons and leptons in the stellar core, with isothermal or isentropic profile, we show that particle populations and equation of state are very similar. As far as the maximum mass is concerned, we find that its value turns out to be almost independent on T, while a slight decrease is observed in the isentropic case, due to the enhanced proton fraction in the high density range.
We study the hadron-quark phase transition in the interior of hot protoneutron stars, combining the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach for hadronic matter with the MIT bag model or the Dyson-Schwinger model for quark matter. We examine the structure of the mixed phase constructed according to different prescriptions for the phase transition, and the resulting consequences for stellar properties. We find important effects for the internal composition, but only very small influence on the global stellar properties.
We study the properties of strange quark matter in equilibrium with normal nuclear matter. Instead of using the conventional bag model in quark sector, we achieve the confinement by a density-dependent quark mass derived from in-medium chiral condensates. In nuclear matter, we adopt the equation of state from the Brueckner-Bethe-Goldstone approach with three-body forces. It is found that the mixed phase can occur, for a reasonable confinement parameter, near the normal nuclear saturation density, and goes over into pure quark matter at about 5 times the saturation. The onset of mixed and quark phases is compatible with the observed class of low-mass neutron stars, but it hinders the occurrence of kaon condensation.
We study the hadron-quark mixed phase in protoneutron stars, where neutrinos are trapped and lepton number becomes a conserved quantity besides the baryon number and electric charge. Considering protoneutron-star matter as a ternary system, the Gibbs conditions are applied together with the Coulomb interaction. We find that there no crystalline (pasta) structure appears in the regime of high lepton-number fraction; the size of pasta becomes very large and the geometrical structure becomes mechanically unstable due to the charge screening effect. Consequently the whole system is separated into two bulk regions like an amorphous state, where the surface effect is safely neglected. There, the local charge neutrality is approximately attained, so that the equation of state is effectively reduced to the one for a binary system. Hence, we conclude that there is no possibility for the density discontinuity to appear in protoneutron-star matter, which is a specific feature in a pure system. These features are important when considering astrophysical phenomena such as supernova explosions or radiation of the gravitational wave from protoneutron stars.
The cooling process of a protoneutron star is investigated with focus on its sensitivity to properties of hot and dense matter. An equation of state, which includes the nucleon effective mass and nuclear symmetry energy at twice the saturation density as control parameters, is constructed for systematic studies. The numerical code utilized in this study follows a quasi-static evolution of a protoneutron star solving the general-relativistic stellar structure with neutrino diffusion. The cooling timescale evaluated from the neutrino light curve is found to be longer for the models with larger effective masses and smaller symmetry energies at high densities. The present results are compared with those for other equations of state and it is found that they are consistent in terms of their dependences on the effective mass and neutron star radius.