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Astrophysical constraints on a parametric equation of state for neutron-rich nucleonic matter

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Abstract

Extracting the equation of state (EOS) and symmetry energy of dense neutron-rich matter from astrophysical observations is a long-standing goal of nuclear astrophysics. To facilitate the realization of this goal, the feasibility of using an explicitly isospin-dependent parametric EOS for neutron star matter was investigated recently in [1,2,3]. In this contribution, in addition to outlining the model framework and summarizing the most important findings from [1,2,3], we report a few new results regarding constraining parameters characterizing the high-density behavior of nuclear symmetry energy. In particular, the constraints on the pressure of neutron star matter extracted from combining the X-ray observations of the neutron star radius, the minimum–maximum mass \(M=2.01\) \(\hbox {M}_\odot \), and causality condition agree very well with those extracted from analyzing the tidal deformability data by the LIGO + Virgo Collaborations. The limitations of using the radius and/or tidal deformability of neutron stars to constrain the high-density nuclear symmetry energy are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. Lie-Wen Chen, Plamen G. Krastev, Bin Qi, De-Hua Wen, and Jun Xu for their helpful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Astronomy and Solar-Terrestrial Environment, School of Space Science and Physics, Institute of Space Sciences, Shandong University, Weihai, 264209, China

    Nai-Bo Zhang

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University-Commerce, Commerce, TX, 75429, USA

    Nai-Bo Zhang & Bao-An Li

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Correspondence to Bao-An Li.

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NBZ was supported in part by the China Scholarship Council. BAL acknowledges the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, under Award Number DE-SC0013702, the CUSTIPEN (China-U.S. Theory Institute for Physics with Exotic Nuclei) under the U.S. Department of Energy Grant No. DE-SC0009971 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 11320101004.

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Zhang, NB., Li, BA. Astrophysical constraints on a parametric equation of state for neutron-rich nucleonic matter. NUCL SCI TECH 29, 178 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41365-018-0515-9

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