Related papers: Quark-cluster Stars: hints from the surface
The nature of pulsar-like compact stars is still in controversy although the first pulsar was found more than 40 years ago. Generally speaking, conventional neutron stars and non-mainstream quark stars are two types of models to describe…
Thermal and non-thermal radiation from pulsars carries significant information from surface and would have profound implications on the state of dense matter in compact stars. For the non-thermal radio emission, subpulse drifting phenomena…
A quark-cluster state, rather than the color-super-conductivity state, may appear in matter with low-temperature but high density, since the phase transition of chiral symmetry broken and that of color-confinement could not occur…
Two kinds of difficulties have challenged the physics community for many years: (1) knowing nature's building blocks (particle physics) and (2) understanding interacting many-body systems (many-body physics). Both of them exist in the…
This paper gives an brief overview of the structure of hypothetical strange quarks stars (quark stars, for short), which are made of absolutely stable 3-flavor strange quark matter. Such objects can be either bare or enveloped in thin…
It is a pity that the real state of matter in pulsar-like stars is still not determined confidently because of the uncertainty about cold matter at supranuclear density, even 40 years after the discovery of pulsar. Nuclear matter (related…
A pulsar-like compact star is the rump left behind after a supernova where normal baryonic matter is intensely compressed by gravity, but the real state of such compressed baryonic matter is still not well understood because of the…
Under extreme conditions of temperature and/or density, quarks and gluons are expected to undergo a deconfinement phase transition. While this is an ephemeral phenomenon at the ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collider (BNL-RHIC), quark matter…
It depends on the state of matter at supra-nuclear density to model pulsar's structure, which is unfortunately not certain due to the difficulties in physics. In cold quark matter at realistic baryon densities of compact stars (with an…
Quark clustering could occur in cold quark matter because of the strong coupling between quarks at realistic baryon densities of compact stars. Although one may still not be able to calculate this conjectured matter from first principles,…
The nature of pulsar is still unknown because of non-perturbative effects of the fundamental strong interaction, and different models of pulsar inner structures are then suggested, either conventional neutron stars or quark stars.…
The state of super-dense matter is essential for us to understand the nature of pulsars, but the non- perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) makes it very difficult for direct calculations of the state of cold matter at realistic baryon…
The study of dense matter at ultra-high density has a very long history, which is meaningful for us to understand not only cosmic events in extreme circumstances but also fundamental laws of physics. It is well known that the state of cold…
This short review aims at giving a brief overview of the various states of matter that have been suggested to exist in the ultra-dense centers of neutron stars. Particular emphasis is put on the role of quark deconfinement in neutron stars…
Densities in compact stars may be such that quarks are no longer confined in hadrons, but instead behave as weakly interacting particles. In this regime perturbative calculations are possible. Yet, due to high pressures and an attractive…
Pulsar-like compact stars usually have strong magnetic fields, with the strength from $\sim 10^8$ to $\sim 10^{12}$ Gauss on surface. How such strong magnetic fields can be generated and maintained is still an unsolved problem, which is, in…
The existence of deconfined quark matter in the superdense interior of neutron stars is a key question that has drawn considerable attention over the past few decades. Quark matter can comprise an arbitrary fraction of the star, from 0 for…
The appearance of quark matter in the centers of compact stars has a number of astrophysical implications. In this contribution I discuss the structure and stability of compact stars, gravitational radiation from non-axisymmetric…
Gravity compresses the matter in the cores of neutron stars to densities which are significantly higher than the density of ordinary atomic nuclei, thus providing a high-pressure environment in which numerous particle processes - from the…
For physically reasonable bulk and surface properties, quark matter has recently been found to coexist with nuclear matter inside neutron stars in a uniform background of electrons. The microstructure of this mixed phase starts out with a…