Related papers: Mapping the QCD Phase Transition with Accreting Co…
Millisecond pulsars are old, fast spinning neutron stars thought to have evolved from classical pulsars in binary systems, where the rapid rotation is caused by the accretion of matter and angular momentum from their companion. During this…
We investigate a nonlocal chiral quark model with separable 4-fermion interaction for the case of U(3) flavor symmetry and show that strange quark matter is unlikely to occur in a large enough volume of a compact star to entail remarkable…
The measurement of the spin frequency in accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars (AMXPs) is strongly affected by the presence of an unmodeled component in the pulse arrival times called 'timing noise'. We show that it is possible to attribute…
I use simple thermodynamic reasoning to argue that at temperatures of order a trillion kelvin, QCD, the theory which describes strongly interacting particles such as protons and neutrons under normal conditions, undergoes a phase transition…
Accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars are an important subset of low-mass X-ray binaries in which coherent X-ray pulsations can be observed during occasional, bright outbursts (X-ray luminosity $L_X\sim 10^{36}$ erg s$^{-1}$). These…
Recently, it has been shown that soft-state black hole X-ray binaries and active galactic nuclei populate a plane in the space defined by the black hole mass, accretion rate and characteristic frequency. We show that this plane can be…
I first sketch recent developments concerning the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter as a function of temperature and baryon density, obtained using a model for two-flavor QCD in which the interaction between quarks is modelled on…
We suggest a new Bayesian analysis using disjunct M-R constraints for extracting probability measures for cold, dense matter equations of state. One of the key issues of such an analysis is the question of a deconfinement transition in…
The cooling of compact isolated objects for different values of the gravitational mass has been simulated for two alternative assumptions. One is that the interior of the star is purely hadronic and second that the star can have a rather…
The transition from hadronic matter to quark matter in the core of neutron stars is likely to be associated with the appearance of a mixed phase, leading to a smooth variation of the star density profile. We discuss the results of a…
A neutron star (NS) accreting matter from a companion star in a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) system can spin up to become a millisecond pulsar (MSP). Properties of many such MSP systems are known, which is excellent for probing fundamental…
We discuss a model wherein soft gamma-ray repeaters (SGRs), anomalous X-ray pulsars (AXPs), and radio quiet isolated neutron stars (RQINSs) are all compact objects exhibiting superconductivity, namely color-flavor locked quark stars. In…
The appearance of quark phases in the dense interior of neutron stars provides one possibility to soften the equation of state (EOS) of neutron star matter at high densities. This softening leads to more compact equilibrium configurations…
When nuclear matter reaches a high enough density, we expect that the nucleons will overlap so much as to lose their separate identities, and merge into quark matter. In this talk I will review some theoretical expectations and speculations…
The detection, in 1998, of the first Accreting Millisecond Pulsar, started an exciting season of continuing discoveries in the fashinating field of compact binary systems harbouring a neutron star. Indeed, in these last three lustres,…
Theoretically, the phase transition between the confined and deconfined phases of quarks can have a remarkable effect on the spin properties of millisecond pulsars and on the spin distribution of the population of x-ray neutron stars in…
We study radial oscillations of hybrid non-rotating neutron stars composed by a quark matter core and hadronic external layers. At first, we physically deduce the junction conditions that should be imposed between two any phases in these…
Discovery of huge magnetic field in magnetars has stimulated a renewed interest about the magnetic field and physics of compact stars, where microphysics such as QED or QCD may play active parts. Here we discuss the equation of state (EOS)…
New astrophysical instruments such as skA (square kilometer Array) and IXO (formerly Constellation X) promise the discovery of tens of thousands of new isolated rotating neutron stars (pulsars), neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binaries…
We study the phase diagram of (large-$N_c$) QCD using a simplistic holographic hard-wall model with a dynamical scalar field and a homogeneous Ansatz representing a smeared instanton/baryon density. The resulting phase diagram is…