We investigate the role of pressure in a class of generalised Skyrme models. We introduce pressure as the trace of the spatial part of the energy-momentum tensor and show that it obeys the usual thermodynamical relation. Then, we compute analytically the mean-field equation of state in the high and medium pressure regimes by applying topological bounds on compact domains. The equation of state is further investigated numerically for the charge one skyrmions. We identify which term in a generalised Skyrme model is responsible for which part in the equation of state. Further, we compare our findings with the corresponding results in the Walecka model.
We compare three different statistical models for the equation of state (EOS) of stellar matter at subnuclear densities and temperatures (0.5-10 MeV) expected to occur during the collapse of massive stars and supernova explosions. The models introduce the distributions of various nuclear species in nuclear statistical equilibrium, but use somewhat different nuclear physics inputs. It is demonstrated that the basic thermodynamical quantities of stellar matter under these conditions are similar, except in the region of high densities and low temperatures. We demonstrate that mass and isotopic distributions have considerable differences related to the different assumptions of the models on properties of nuclei at these stellar conditions. Overall, the three models give similar trends, but the details reflect the uncertainties related to the modeling of medium effects, such as the temperature and density dependence of surface and bulk energies of heavy nuclei, and the nuclear shell structure effects. We discuss importance of new physics inputs for astrophysical calculations from experimental data obtained in intermediate energy heavy-ion collisions, in particular, the similarities of the conditions reached during supernova explosions and multifragmentation reactions.
In a holographic model, which was used to investigate the color superconducting phase of QCD, a dilute gas of instantons is introduced to study the nuclear matter. The free energy of the nuclear matter is computed as a function of the baryon chemical potential in the probe approximation. Then the equation of state is obtained at low temperature. Using the equation of state for the nuclear matter, the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkov equations for a cold compact star are solved. We find the mass-radius relation of the star, which is similar to the one for quark star. This result is understood from the stiffness and the large speed of sound of the instanton gas considered here.
We perform statistically rigorous uncertainty quantification (UQ) for chiral effective field theory ($chi$EFT) applied to infinite nuclear matter up to twice nuclear saturation density. The equation of state (EOS) is based on high-order many-body perturbation theory calculations with nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon interactions up to fourth order in the $chi$EFT expansion. From these calculations our newly developed Bayesian machine-learning approach extracts the size and smoothness properties of the correlated EFT truncation error. We then propose a novel extension that uses multitask machine learning to reveal correlations between the EOS at different proton fractions. The inferred in-medium $chi$EFT breakdown scale in pure neutron matter and symmetric nuclear matter is consistent with that from free-space nucleon-nucleon scattering. These significant advances allow us to provide posterior distributions for the nuclear saturation point and propagate theoretical uncertainties to derived quantities: the pressure and incompressibility of symmetric nuclear matter, the nuclear symmetry energy, and its derivative. Our results, which are validated by statistical diagnostics, demonstrate that an understanding of truncation-error correlations between different densities and different observables is crucial for reliable UQ. The methods developed here are publicly available as annotated Jupyter notebooks.
A central issue in the theory of astrophysical compact objects and heavy ion reactions at intermediate and relativistic energies is the Nuclear Equation of State (EoS). On one hand, the large and expanding set of experimental and observational data is expected to constrain the behaviour of the nuclear EoS, especially at density above saturation, where it is directly linked to fundamental processes which can occur in dense matter. On the other hand, theoretical predictions for the EoS at high density can be challenged by the phenomenological findings. In this topical review paper we present the many-body theory of nuclear matter as developed along different years and with different methods. Only nucleonic degrees of freedom are considered. We compare the different methods at formal level, as well as the final EoS calculated within each one of the considered many-body schemes. The outcome of this analysis should help in restricting the uncertainty of the theoretical predictions for the nuclear EoS.
We propose a new equation of state for nuclear matter based on a generalized Skyrme model which is consistent with all current constraints on the observed properties of neutron stars. This generalized model depends only on two free parameters related to the ranges of pressure values at which different submodels are dominant, and which can be adjusted so that mass-radius and deformability constraints from astrophysical and gravitational wave measurements can be met. Our results support the Skyrme model and its generalizations as good candidates for a low energy effective field-theoretic description of nuclear matter even at extreme conditions such as those inside neutron stars.