Massive neutron stars with holographic multiquark cores

Abstract

Abstract Phases of nuclear matter are crucial in the determination of physical properties of neutron stars (NS). In the core of NS, the density and pressure become so large that the nuclear matter possibly undergoes phase transition into a deconfined phase, consisting of quarks and gluons and their colour bound states. Even though the quark-gluon plasma has been observed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions (Gyulassy and McLerran, Nucl Phys A 750:30–63, 2005; Andronic et al., Nature 561: 321–330, 2018), it is still unclear whether exotic quark matter exists inside neutron stars. Recent results from the combination of various perturbative theoretical calculations with astronomical observations (Demorest et al., Nature 467:1081–1083, 2010; Antoniadis et al., Science 340:1233232, 2013) shows that (exotic) quark matter could exist inside the cores of neutron stars above 2.0 solar masses ( $$M_{\odot }$$ M ⊙ ) (Annala et al., Nat Phys, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0914-9 , arXiv:1903.09121 [astro-ph.HE], 2020). We revisit the holographic model in Refs. (Burikham et al., JHEP 05:006, arXiv:0811.0243 [hep-ph], 2009; Burikham et al., JHEP 06:040, arXiv:1003.5470 [hep-ph], 2010) and implement the equation of states (EoS) of multiquark nuclear matter to interpolate the pQCD EoS in the high-density region with the nuclear EoS known at low densities. For sufficiently large energy density scale ( $$\epsilon _{s}$$ ϵ s ) of the model, it is found that multiquark phase is thermodynamically prefered than the stiff nuclear matter above the transition points. The NS with holographic multiquark core could have masses in the range $$1.96{-}2.23~(1.64{-}2.10) M_{\odot }$$ 1.96 - 2.23 ( 1.64 - 2.10 ) M ⊙ and radii $$14.3{-}11.8~(14.0{-}11.1)$$ 14.3 - 11.8 ( 14.0 - 11.1 ) km for $$\epsilon _{s}=26~(28)$$ ϵ s = 26 ( 28 ) GeV/fm $$^{3}$$ 3 respectively. Effects of proton–baryon fractions are studied for certain type of baryonic EoS; larger proton fractions could reduce radius of the NS with multiquark core by less than a kilometer.