We study the cooling of isolated neutron stars with particular regard to the importance of nuclear pairing gaps. A microscopic nuclear equation of state derived in the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach is used together with compatible neutron and proton pairing gaps. We then study the effect of modifying the gaps on the final deduced neutron star mass distributions. We find that a consistent description of all current cooling data can be achieved and a reasonable neutron star mass distribution can be predicted employing the (slightly reduced by about 40%) proton 1S0 Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) gaps and no neutron 3P2 pairing.
We demonstrate that the high-quality cooling data observed for the young neutron star in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A over the past 10 years--as well as all other reliably known temperature data of neutron stars--can be comfortably explained within the nuclear medium cooling scenario. The cooling rates of this scenario account for medium-modified one-pion exchange in dense matter and polarization effects in the pair-breaking formations of superfluid neutrons and protons. Crucial for the successful description of the observed data is a substantial reduction of the thermal conductivity, resulting from a suppression of both the electron and nucleon contributions to it by medium effects. We also find that possibly in as little as about ten years of continued observation, the data may tell whether or not fast cooling processes are active in this neutron star.
We investigate the nuclear pasta phases in neutron star crusts by conducting a large number of three-dimensional Hartree-Fock+BCS calculations at densities leading to the crust-core transition. We survey the shape parameter space of pasta at constant pressure. Spaghetti, waffles, lasagna, bi-continuous phases and cylindrical holes occupy local minima in the resulting Gibbs energy surfaces. The bi-continuous phase, in which both the neutron gas and nuclear matter extend continuously in all dimensions and therefore protons are delocalized, appears over a large range of depths. Our results support the idea that nuclear pasta is a glassy system. Multiple pasta configurations coexist in a given layer of the crust. At a characteristic temperature, of order $10^8$-$10^9$K, different phases become frozen into domains whose sizes we estimate to be 1-50 times the lattice spacing and over which the local density and electron fraction can vary. Above this temperature, there is very little long-range order and matter is an amorphous solid. Electron scattering off domain boundaries may contribute to the disorder resistivity of the pasta phases. Annealing of the domains may occur during cooling; repopulating of local minima during crustal heating might lead to temperature dependent transport properties in the deep layers of the crust. We identify 4 distinct regions: (1) nuclear pasta first appears as a local minima, but spherical nuclei are the ground state; (2) nuclear pasta become the absolute minimum, but spherical nuclei are still a local minimum (3) only nuclear pasta appears in local minima, and protons are still localized in at least one dimension (4) only pasta appears, and protons are delocalized. The whole pasta region can occupy up to 70% of the crust by mass and 40% by thickness, and the layer in which protons are delocalized could occupy 45% of the crust mass and 25% of its thickness.
We explore the equation of state for nuclear matter in the quark-meson coupling model, including full Fock terms. The comparison with phenomenological constraints can be used to restrict the few additional parameters appearing in the Fock terms which are not present at Hartree level. Because the model is based upon the in-medium modification of the quark structure of the bound hadrons, it can be applied without additional parameters to include hyperons and to calculate the equation of state of dense matter in beta-equilibrium. This leads naturally to a study of the properties of neutron stars, including their maximum mass, their radii and density profiles.
The self-energy effect on the neutron-proton (np) pairing gap is investigated up to the third order within the framework of the extend Bruecker-Hartree-Fock (BHF) approach combined with the BCS theory. The self-energy up to the second-order contribution turns out to reduce strongly the effective energy gap, while the emph{renormalization} term enhances it significantly. In addition, the effect of the three-body force on the np pairing gap is shown to be negligible. To connect the present results with the np pairing in finite nuclei, an effective density-dependent zero-range pairing force is established with the parameters calibrated to the microscopically calculated energy gap.
We review the long standing problem of superfluid pairing in pure neutron matter. For the $s$-wave pairing, we summarize the state of the art of many-body approaches including different $nn$ interactions, medium polarization, short-range correlations and BCS-BEC crossover effects, and compare them with quantum Monte Carlo results at low-densities. We also address pairing in the $p$-wave, which appears at higher densities and hence has large uncertainties due to the poorly constrained interactions, medium effects and many-body forces.