Name: Morten Stejner Sand Pedersen
Institution: University of Aarhus, Denmark

University of Washington

Astrolunch

Abstract:
At the super-nuclear densities found in neutron stars quarks may become deconfined and form a new phase of matter consisting of almost equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks (known as strange quark matter). The existence of this phase in neutron stars depends on poorly constrained strong interaction properties and remains to be decided by observation or experiment. One possible observable from such a transition would be the heat released as hadronic matter crosses the the phase boundary and becomes deconfined. It has been hypothesized that strange quark matter may be the ground state of the strong interaction in which case neutron stars would consist almost exclusively of strange quark matter, and such deconfinement heating would have to power the thermal emission from quiescent soft X-ray transients - but even if strange quark matter is not absolutely stable heating associated with a transition in the core may still have consequences for the thermal evolution of isolated neutron stars.