The Behavior of Matter under Extreme Conditions
Abstract
The cores of neutron stars harbor the highest matter densities known to occur in nature, up to several times the densities in atomic nuclei. Similarly, magnetic field strengths can exceed the strongest fields generated in terrestrial laboratories by ten orders of magnitude. Hyperon-dominated matter, deconfined quark matter, superfluidity, even superconductivity are predicted in neutron stars. Similarly, quantum electrodynamics predicts that in strong magnetic fields the vacuum becomes birefringent. The properties of matter under such conditions is governed by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED), and the close study of the properties of neutron stars offers the unique opportunity to test and explore the richness of QCD and QED in a regime that is utterly beyond the reach of terrestrial experiments. Experimentally, this is almost virgin territory.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0904.0435,
title = {The Behavior of Matter under Extreme Conditions},
author = {F. Paerels and M. Mendez and M. Agueros and M. Baring and D. Barret and S. Bhattacharyya and E. Cackett and J. Cottam and M. Diaz Trigo and D. Fox and M. Garcia and E. Gotthelf and W. Hermsen and W. Ho and K. Hurley and P. Jonker and A. Juett and P. Kaaret and O. Kargaltsev and J. Lattimer and G. Matt and F. Ozel and G. Pavlov and R. Rutledge and R. Smith and L. Stella and T. Strohmayer and H. Tananbaum and P. Uttley and M. van Kerkwijk and M. Weisskopf and S. Zane},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0904.0435},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
8 pages, 4 figures. White paper submitted to the Astro2010 Decadal survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics