Cold hadronic matter under pressure should eventually undergo a deconfinement transition, if it is compressed to sufficiently high densities. However, due to a lack of first-principles techniques, neither the exact density where this transition occurs, nor its precise characteristics are currently known. Some of the highest densities in nature occur in the cores of massive neutron stars, and thus these objects may provide an important window on this unknown regime.
In this talk, I will show how by combining robust theoretical and observational input we can see evidence for the transition between hadronic and quark matter along the stable neutron-star sequence, indicating that neutron
stars indeed probe the transition region of dense QCD. Moreover, I will show that–provided the speed of sound of dense QCD matter is not too extreme–massive neutron stars likely host sizable quark-matter cores, a scenario which is completely consistent with all current observations of these objects.
This talk is primarily based on https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.09121 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05132
Tyler Gorda received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2016. From 2016-2018, he was a postdoc at the University of Helsinki, and from 2018-2020 he was a postdoc at the University of Virginia. Since 2020 he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the TU Darmstadt. Tyler's research interests primarily focus on the properties of QCD matter under extreme conditions of density or temperature. He is especially interested in the regime of cold and dense QCD matter, such as that probed in the cores of neutron stars or in binary neutron-star mergers.
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