Abstract
The discovery of nondiffuse sources of gravitational waves through compact-object mergers opens new prospects for the study of physics beyond the Standard Model. In this paper, we study the effects of a new force between quarks, suggested by the gauging of baryon number, on pure neutron matter at supranuclear densities. This leads to a stiffening of the equation of state, allowing neutron stars to be both larger and heavier and possibly accommodating the light progenitor of GW190814 as a neutron star. The role of conventional three-body forces in neutron star structure is still poorly understood, though they can act in a similar way, implying that the mass and radius do not in themselves resolve whether new physics is coming into play. However, a crucial feature of the scenario we propose is that the regions of the new physics parameter space that induce observable changes to neutron star structure are testable at low-energy accelerator facilities. This testability distinguishes our scenario from other classes of new phenomena in dense matter.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 045802 |
| Journal | Physical Review C |
| Volume | 104 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2021 Published by the American Physical Society
Funding
National Science Foundation Heising-Simons Foundation U.S. Department of Energy We thank the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS) for an inspiring environment and support. J.M.B. acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY-1630782 and Heising-Simons Foundation Grant No. 2017-228, and S.G. acknowledges partial support from U.S. Department of Energy Contract No. DE-FG02-96ER40989.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Science Foundation Heising-Simons Foundation U.S. Department of Energy | |
| U.S. Department of Energy Chinese Academy of Sciences Guangzhou Municipal Science and Technology Project Oak Ridge National Laboratory Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment National Science Foundation National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center National Natural Science Foundation of China | PHY-1630782 |
| U.S. Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory U.S. Department of Energy National Science Foundation National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center | DE-FG02-96ER40989 |
| Heising-Simons Foundation | 2017-228 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Nuclear and High Energy Physics