arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Renxin Xu.
From a model-independent point of view, we address the possibility that quark clustering could occur in cold quark matter at realistic baryon densities because of the likely strong coupling between quarks in compact stars.
Two kinds of difficulties have challenged the physics community for many years: (1) knowing nature's building blocks (particle physics) and (2) understanding interacting many-body systems (many-body physics). Both of them exist in the research of quark matter and compact stars. This paper addresses the possibility that quark clustering, rather than a color super-conducting state, could occur in cold quark matter at realistic baryon densities of compact stars, since a weakly coupling treatment of the interaction between quarks might not be reliable. Cold quark matter is conjectured to be in a solid state if thermal kinematic energy is much lower than the interaction energy of quark clusters. Different manifestations of pulsar-like compact stars are discussed, as well as modeled in a regime of solid quark stars.
We propose a star-quake model to understand X-ray flares of both long and short Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) in a solid quark star regime. Two kinds of central engines for GRBs are available if pulsar-like stars are actually (solid) quark stars, i.e., the SNE-type GRBs and the SGR-type GRBs. It is found that a quark star could be solidified about 10^3 to 10^6 s later after its birth if the critical temperature of phase transition is a few MeV, and then a new source of free energy (i.e., elastic and gravitational ones, rather than rotational or magnetic energy) could be possible to power GRB X-ray flares.
Quark matter both in terrestrial experiment and in astrophysics is briefly reviewed. Astrophysical quark matter could appear in the early Universe, in compact stars, and as cosmic rays. Emphasis is put on quark star as the nature of pulsars. Possible astrophysical implications of experiment-discovered sQGP are also concisely discussed.
It is a pity that the real state of matter in pulsar-like stars is still not determined confidently because of the uncertainty about cold matter at supranuclear density, even 40 years after the discovery of pulsar. Nuclear matter (related to neutron stars) is one of the speculations for the inner constitution of pulsars even from the Landau's time more than 70 years ago, but quark matter (related to quark stars) is an alternative due to the fact of asymptotic freedom of interaction between quarks as the standard model of particle physics develops since 1960s. Therefore, one has to focus on astrophysical observations in order to answer what the nature of pulsars is. In this presentation, I would like to summarize possible observational evidence/hints that pulsar-like stars could be quark stars, and to address achievable clear evidence for quark stars in the future experiments.
A recent observation has shown that PSR B1257+12 could have quite small X-ray emitting area, only about 2000 m$^2$, which is more than three orders smaller than the canonical polar cap size. We suggest here that PSR B1257+12 could be a low-mass quark star with radius of $R \simeq 0.6$ km and mass of $M \simeq 3\times10^{-4}\msun$. Such a low-mass quark star system may form in an accretion induced collapse process or a collision process of two quark stars.
In this letter we propose a possible mechanism trying to alleviate the current difficulty in core-collapse supernovae by forming a strange quark star inside the collapsing core. Although the initial longtime cooling behavior of nascent strange stars is dominated by neutrino emissions, thermal emissions including photons and $e^\pm$ pair plasma do play a significant role in the explosion dynamics under this picture. The key to promote a successful shock outside a bare strange star is more likely to be the radiation pressure caused by thermal photons rather than neutrinos in conventional models. We observed through calculation that radiation pressure can push the overlying mantle away through photon-electron scattering with energy (the work done by radiation pressure) as much as ~10^{51} erg if protoquark stars are born with temperatures higher than ~ (30-40) MeV. This result not only indicates that strange quark stars should be bare ever since their formations, it could also provide a possible explanation to the formation of fireballs in cosmic long-soft $γ$-ray bursts associated to supernovae.
The magnetar model and a solid quark star model for anomalous X-ray pulsars/soft gamma-ray repeaters (AXPs/SGRs) are discussed. Different manifestations of pulsar-like stars are speculated to be due to both their nature (e.g., mass and strain) and their nurture (ambience, and consequently the type of accretion) in the solid quark star scenario. Relevant arguments made by the author's group, including a debate on solid cold quark matter, are briefly summarized too.
Color confinement is only a supposition, which has not been proved in QCD yet. It is proposed here that macroscopic quark gluon plasma in astrophysics could hardly maintain colorless because of causality. The authors expected that the existence of chromatic strange quark stars as well as chromatic strangelets preserved from the QCD phase transition in the early universe could be unavoidable if their colorless correspondents do exist.
Sub-millisecond pulsars should be triaxial (Jacobi ellipsoids), which may not spin down to super-millisecond periods via gravitation wave radiation during their lifetimes if they are extremely low mass bare strange quark stars. It is addressed that the spindown of sub-millisecond pulsars would be torqued dominantly by gravitational wave radiation (with braking index n ~ 5). The radio luminosity of sub-millisecond pulsars could be high enough to be detected in advanced radio telescopes. Sub-millisecond pulsars, if detected, should be very likely quark stars with low masses and/or small equatorial ellipticities.
Members of the family of pulsar-like stars are distinguished by their different manifestations observed, i.e., radio pulsars, accretion-driven X-ray pulsars, X-ray bursts, anomalous X-ray pulsars/soft gamma-ray repeaters, compact center objects, and dim thermal neutron stars. Though one may conventionally think that these stars are normal neutron stars, it is still an open issue whether they are actually neutron stars or quark stars, as no convincing work, either theoretical from first principles or observational, has confirmed Baade-Zwicky's original idea that supernovae produce neutron stars. After introducing briefly the history of pulsars and quark stars, the author summarizes the recent achievements in his pulsar group, including quark matter phenomenology at low temperature, starquakes of solid pulsars, low-mass quark stars, and the pulsar magnetospheric activities.
A quark-cluster state, rather than the color-super-conductivity state, may appear in matter with low-temperature but high density, since the phase transition of chiral symmetry broken and that of color-confinement could not occur imultaneously. Such quark clusters might be stable in strange quark matter. Quark stars would have temperatures to be low enough to freeze by residual color interaction between the clusters, and become then solid ones.The charge numbers and the sizes of quark clusters, as well as the residual interactions in-between are investigated. The solid state properties of quark stars are constrained by observations.