Chiral symmetry restoration and hyperon suppression in neutron stars
Abstract
The ``hyperon puzzle'' remains a fundamental challenge in nuclear astrophysics. We investigate hyperon emergence in neutron star matter using the parity doublet model with chiral representation . This framework naturally incorporates chiral symmetry restoration and provides a systematic description of baryon masses in dense matter through the interplay between the chiral condensate and the chiral invariant mass . We find that the hyperon onset density exhibits strong sensitivity to : for MeV, hyperons first appear at while for MeV, hyperons emerge only above . This delayed onset arises from the weakened density dependence of baryon masses at larger values. When the hyperon onset density exceeds the expected quark-hadron transition range (--), matter undergoes deconfinement before hyperons populate, avoiding the EoS softening while maintaining consistency with massive neutron star observations. Our results demonstrate that chiral dynamics provides a natural resolution to the hyperon puzzle without requiring ad hoc repulsive hyperon interactions.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.12503,
title = {Chiral symmetry restoration and hyperon suppression in neutron stars},
author = {Bikai Gao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.12503},
year = {2026}
}