No Arabic abstract
We study the equation of state (EOS) of kaon-condensed matter including the effects of temperature and trapped neutrinos. It is found that the order of the phase transition to a kaon-condensed phase, and whether or not Gibbs rules for phase equilibrium can be satisfied in the case of a first order transition, depend sensitively on the choice of the kaon-nucleon interaction. The main effect of finite temperature, for any value of the lepton fraction, is to mute the effects of a first order transition, so that the thermodynamics becomes similar to that of a second order transition. Above a critical temperature, found to be at least 30--60 MeV depending upon the interaction, the first order transition disappears. The phase boundaries in baryon density versus lepton number and baryon density versus temperature planes are delineated. We find that the thermal effects on the maximum gravitational mass of neutron stars are as important as the effects of trapped neutrinos, in contrast to previously studied cases in which the matter contained only nucleons or in which hyperons and/or quark matter were considered. Kaon-condensed EOSs permit the existence of metastable neutron stars, because the maximum mass of an initially hot, lepton-rich protoneutron star is greater than that of a cold, deleptonized neutron star. The large thermal effects imply that a metastable protoneutron stars collapse to a black hole could occur much later than in previously studied cases that allow metastable configurations.
In this work we investigate the possible condensation of tetraneutron resonant states in the lower density neutron rich gas regions inside Neutron Stars (NSs). Using a relativistic density functional approach we characterize the system containing different hadronic species including, besides tetraneutrons, nucleons and a set of light clusters ($^3$He, $alpha$ particles, deuterium and tritium). $sigma,omega$ and $rho$ mesonic fields provide the interaction in the nuclear system. We study how the tetraneutron presence could significantly impact the nucleon pairing fractions and the distribution of baryonic charge among species. For this we assume that they can be thermodynamically produced in an equilibrated medium and scan a range of coupling strengths to the mesonic fields from prescriptions based on isospin symmetry arguments. We find that tetraneutrons may appear over a range of densities belonging to the outer NS crust carrying a sizable amount of baryonic charge thus depleting the nucleon pairing fractions.
In the first part of this paper, we investigate the possible existence of a structured hadron-quark mixed phase in the cores of neutron stars. This phase, referred to as the hadron-quark pasta phase, consists of spherical blob, rod, and slab rare phase geometries. Particular emphasis is given to modeling the size othis phase in rotating neutron stars. We use the relativistic mean-field theory to model hadronic matter and the non-local three-flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model to describe quark matter. Based on these models, the hadron-quark pasta phase exists only in very massive neutron stars, whose rotational frequencies are less than around 300 Hz. All other stars are not dense enough to trigger quark deconfinement in their cores. Part two of the paper deals with the quark-hadron composition of hot (proto) neutron star matter. To this end we use a local three-flavor Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model which includes the t Hooft (quark flavor mixing) term. It is found that this term leads to non-negligible changes in the particle composition of (proto) neutron stars made of hadron-quark matter.
We investigate the composition and the equation of state of the kaon condensed phase in neutrino-free and neutrino-trapped star matter within the framework of the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach with three-body forces. We find that neutrino trapping shifts the onset density of kaon condensation to a larger baryon density, and reduces considerably the kaon abundance. As a consequence, when kaons are allowed, the equation of state of neutrino-trapped star matter becomes stiffer than the one of neutrino free matter. The effects of different three-body forces are compared and discussed. Neutrino trapping turns out to weaken the role played by the symmetry energy in determining the composition of stellar matter, and thus reduces the difference between the results obtained by using different three-body forces.
Functional renormalisation group approach is applied to a system of kaons with finite chemical potential. A set of approximate flow equations for the effective couplings is derived and solved. At high scale the system is found to be at the normal phase whereas at some critical value of the running scale it undergoes the phase transition (PT) to the phase with a spontaneously broken symmetry with the kaon condensate as an order parameter. The value of the condensate turns out to be quite sensitive to the kaon-kaon scattering length.
We formulate kaon condensation in dense baryonic matter with anti-kaons fluctuating from the Fermi-liquid fixed point. This entails that in the Wilsonian RG approach, the decimation is effectuated in the baryonic sector to the Fermi surface while in the meson sector to the origin. In writing the kaon-baryon (KN) coupling, we will take a generalized hidden local symmetry Lagrangian for the meson sector endowed with a mended symmetry that has the unbroken symmetry limit at high density in which the Goldstone $pi$, scalar $s$, and vectors $rho$ (and $omega$) and $a_1$ become massless. The vector mesons $rho$ (and $omega$) and $a_1$ can be identified as emergent (hidden) local gauge fields and the scalar $s$ as the dilaton field of the spontaneously broken scale invariance at chiral restoration. In matter-free space, when the vector mesons and the scalar meson -- whose masses are much greater than that of the pion -- are integrated out, then the resulting KN coupling Lagrangian consists of the leading chiral order ($O(p^1)$) Weinberg-Tomozawa term and the next chiral order ($O(p^2)$) $Sigma_{KN}$ term. In addressing kaon condensation in dense nuclear matter in chiral perturbation theory (ChPT), one makes an expansion in the small Fermi momentum $k_F$. We argue that in the Wilsonian RG formalism with the Fermi-liquid fixed point, the expansion is on the contrary in $1/k_F$ with the large Fermi momentum $k_F$. The kaon-quasinucleon interaction resulting from integrating out the massive mesons consists of a relevant term from the scalar exchange (analog to the $Sigma_{KN}$ term) and an irrelevant term from the vector-meson exchange (analog to the Weinberg-Tomozawa term). It is found that the critical density predicted by the latter approach, controlled by the relevant term, is three times less than that predicted by chiral perturbation theory.