Speaker
Description
The existence of neutron stars provide us with a challenge and a
possibility to study strong interaction, too. At the center of
neutron stars the densities can reach 6-8 times the normal nuclear densities,
and these densities cannot be studied in terrestrial experiments.
Therefore, it provides us with constraints for the properties of the cold,
dense strongly interacting matter.
The existence of quark matter inside the heaviest neutron stars has
been the topic of numerous recent studies, many of them suggesting
that a phase transition to strongly interacting conformal matter
inside neutron stars is feasible. Here we examine this hybrid star
scenario using a soft and a stiff hadronic model, a constituent
quark model with three quark flavours, and applying a smooth
crossover transition between the two. Within a Bayesian framework,
we study the effect of up-to-date constraints from neutron star
observations on the equation-of-state parameters and various
neutron star observables. We find, consistently with other studies, that a
peak in the speed of sound, exceeding 1/3, is highly favoured
by astrophysical measurements.
