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Veronica Dexheimer

Publications and source records attributed to Veronica Dexheimer.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

How strange: Phase diagrams with 3 critical points

We show that the Chiral Mean-Field model (CMF) can produce a phase diagram with three critical points: the nuclear liquid-gas transition, quark deconfinement, and a strangeness driven transition. The strangeness driven transition separates a mainly nucleonic phase from one dominated by hyperons and baryon resonances. We discuss the compositional change in these transitions and their possible signatures in heavy-ion collisions and neutron star mergers.

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Strongly coupled quark matter in neutron stars and their mergers

The discovery of the strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma (sQGP) in high-energy heavy-ion collisions has revealed remarkable properties of matter at high temperature, with transport coefficients close to conjectured bounds from quantum field theory at strong coupling. The high sQGP collision rates imply very large energy uncertainties and the melting of quasiparticle structures. Deploying quantum many-body theory based on the self-consistent $T$-matrix approach for the sQGP at high temperature, we investigate its manifestation at high baryon density and low temperature, as present in neutron stars and their mergers. We constrain the chemical-potential dependence of the quark interaction kernel using first-principles information from Quantum Chromodynamics on baryon-number susceptibilities. Very large collisional widths persist at large density and are found to relegate superconducting phases to rather small temperatures. Instead, a strongly coupled diquark liquid prevails in the thermodynamics under the conditions relevant to neutron-star mergers. At lower densities, the diquarks take over from the single-quark contributions, suggesting a pathway toward hadronization. Our results are consistent with observational constraints on the equation of state of neutron stars, corroborating the presence of strongly coupled quark matter in the interior of these objects.

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Strangeness Transport in Binary Neutron Star Mergers

The presence of hyperons in the cores of neutron stars opens fast strangeness equilibration channels that can produce bulk-viscous dissipation during binary inspiral. Because these reactions coexist with electron $\beta$-equilibration, tidal compression can drive the two coupled chemical imbalances far beyond linear response. We construct the first reaction network that self-consistently evolves the electron and strangeness fractions with a four-dimensional strangeness-dependent chiral mean-field (CMF) equation of state, including nucleonic and hyperonic Urca processes and non-leptonic hyperon reactions. For periodic density perturbations, representative of inspiral oscillations, we find that rapid strangeness conversion can generate a large $\beta$-imbalance, after which slow $\beta$-equilibration bottlenecks strangeness relaxation. Rather than decaying exponentially, the coupled system consequently exhibits dynamically important algebraic decay in a far-from-equilibrium regime. At the $\rm keV$ temperatures expected during inspiral, this nonlinear response produces a broad enhancement of the effective bulk viscosity, reaching $\sim10^{31}\,\mathrm{g\,cm^{-1}\,s^{-1}}$ for $320$ Hz oscillations. A phenomenological estimate of continuous inspiral dissipation yields gravitational-wave phase shifts up to $\sim0.14$ rad for neutron stars with hyperonic cores. Self-consistent, far-from-equilibrium strangeness transport may therefore provide a dynamical probe of hyperons in neutron-star interiors.

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The equation of state for neutron stars

This chapter is intended as an introduction to dense matter and the equation of state of neutron stars and their mergers. It begins with a brief description of neutron star interiors, followed by a historical overview of the theoretical frameworks used to describe them focusing on relativistic formalisms, including different degrees of freedom, models, symmetries, and phases. It also provides an overview of our current understanding of dense matter (including theory, experiments, and observations) and discusses the advances we expect to see in the field over the next decade.

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Neural-Accelerated Bayesian Calibration of Chiral Mean-Field Models to Nuclear Saturation and Vacuum Properties

Chiral models of nuclear interactions provide approximate, phenomenological descriptions of dense matter that respect the symmetries of quantum chromodynamics. Their Lagrangian parameters, however, are difficult to calibrate because these models are not controlled effective theories. Furthermore, repeated model evaluations are computationally expensive, and most parameter choices fail to reproduce acceptable saturation properties or hadron masses in vacuum. To address this, we develop a Bayesian inference framework to identify parameter regions consistent with nuclear saturation properties and vacuum experimental constraints. We implement this framework through a neural-network surrogate approximation that accelerates the repeated mapping from model parameters to nuclear and particle observables. Our fully-modular, neural-accelerated Bayesian framework interfaces the open-source MUSES Calculation Engine, the Bilby inference library, and the PyTorch machine-learning toolkit. We then apply the framework to the chiral mean-field model with a new generalized quartic vector self-interaction sector. We find that viable solutions are rare but broadly distributed within certain regions of parameter space, with the data constraining combinations of couplings more strongly than individual Lagrangian parameters. The resulting degeneracies imply that distinct saturation-compatible models can lead to qualitatively different descriptions of dense nuclear matter and, thus, of neutron stars, highlighting the need to combine terrestrial and astrophysical information.

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Studying the QCD Matter produced in Heavy-Ion Collisions using the MUSES Calculation Engine

The equation of state of hot and dense matter is essential for describing heavy-ion collisions at all collision energies. Here, we explore the capabilities of the latest version of the MUSES Calculation Engine, $\textit{Calliope}$, focusing on software modules and workflows that compute the equation of state and observable properties of the matter produced in heavy-ion collisions. These include several equations of state, ranging from first-principles lattice QCD to phenomenological approaches, with or without a critical point, and with phase-space dimensionality ranging from two dimensions defined by temperature $T$ and baryon chemical potential $\mu_B$, to four dimensions after the addition of strangeness and electric-charge chemical potentials $\mu_S$ and $\mu_Q$. We also discuss modules that provide additional thermodynamic quantities and observables relevant for heavy-ion modeling, including elements of the pressure Hessian matrix and transport coefficients. Workflow examples are constructed that merge two equations of state thermodynamically consistently to extend phase-diagram coverage, and feed the results into an equation of state inverter to produce inputs suitable for hydrodynamic simulations. Finally, we apply this framework to perform a relativistic viscous hydrodynamic simulation with equations of state with an extended $T$ and $\mu_B$ coverage and a movable critical point, including effects from transport coefficients that phenomenologically encode critical scaling, at collision energies $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7, 19.6$, and $39$ GeV.

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Neutron Star Equation of State via Physics Informed Neural Network

We present the first application, to the best of our knowledge, of Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to the neutron star equation-of-state (EOS) inverse problem. Two interacting networks -- one representing the EOS $P(\varepsilon)$ as a continuous, non-parametric function, the other solving the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) equations -- are trained jointly on NICER X-ray timing posteriors and pulsar mass measurements. The TOV equations enter as a mean-square ODE residual enforced via automatic differentiation at every training step, rooted in the Neural Differential Equation framework. The inferred EOS satisfies nuclear saturation properties, causality, and perturbative QCD bounds simultaneously; $\chi$EFT consistency at $1$--$2\rhoz$ emerges without explicit enforcement, providing a non-trivial self-consistency check. Across $N=15$ independent training runs, we find a neutron star maximum mass $M_\mathrm{max}=2.06^{+0.07}_{-0.09}$ and radius and tidal deformability of a 1.4 $M_\odot$ star $R_{1.4}=12.85^{+0.03}_{-0.06}$~km and $\Lambda_{1.4}=684$, respectively, with 68\% CI, in agreement with recent Bayesian analyses. Most interestingly, the speed of sound exhibits a reproducible softening at $2$--$4\,\rhoz$, consistent with a quark-hadron crossover.

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S-wave kaon condensation in neutron-star matter within a chiral model framework with dynamical meson masses

We investigate s-wave kaon condensation in dense matter and neutron stars within the updated Chiral Mean Field model with an improved meson description (mCMF), which incorporates dynamically generated in-medium meson masses arising from explicit chiral symmetry breaking and vector-meson self-interactions. In contrast to conventional relativistic mean-field descriptions with constant meson masses, the mCMF framework introduces a self-consistent feedback between the meson sector and the dense-matter equations of motion. The kaon dispersion relation is derived from the nonlinear SU(3) Lagrangian, including the Weinberg-Tomozawa interaction and additional baryon-pseudoscalar couplings, and the onset of condensation is determined under conditions of charge neutrality and $\beta$ equilibrium. Our calculations include the full baryon octet together with electrons and muons at zero temperature. We analyze the impact of hyperons, muons, and kaon condensation on the equation of state, on neutron-star mass--radius relations, and neutron-star thermal evolution, and examine the sensitivity of the onset density and stellar properties to variations in the nucleon--kaon scattering length and to different model vector parameters and vector self-interactions. We find that $K^{-}$ condensation sets in between $n \sim (2-8)\, n_0$ (in units of nuclear saturation density) and leads to a moderate to strong softening (in one case, a slight stiffening of the equation of state), depending on the interplay of kaons and hyperons, while remaining compatible with current $2\,M_\odot$ and small-radius neutron-star observational constraints and producing distinguishable behavior in the neutron-star cooling. This work provides an improved and thermodynamically consistent framework for studying exotic degrees of freedom in neutron-star matter.

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Sensitivity of neutron star observables to microscopic nuclear parameters of realistic equations of state

The equation of state of matter at supranuclear densities governs the astrophysical observables of neutron stars. A realistic, though complex, description is provided by the Chiral-Mean-Field model, which depends on many microscopic nuclear-physics parameters. We present a Fisher-information-inspired analysis of the sensitivity of neutron-star observables to the parameters of the Chiral-Mean-Field model at $\beta$-equilibrium using SLy as a crust. We then compute neutron-star sequences and extract masses, radii, compactnesses, and tidal deformabilities. From the logarithmic derivatives of these observables with respect to each nuclear parameter, we construct a dimensionless, Fisher-inspired sensitivity matrix and perform a principal-component analysis to identify the effective combinations of nuclear parameters that most strongly affect neutron-star observables. Although the ranking depends mildly on the observable, the three most important nuclear parameters are the vacuum value of the dilaton field $\chi_0$ (which sets the overall scale of the scalar potential and trace-anomaly contribution), the scalar singlet strength $g_{1}^X$ (which controls the overall scalar attraction through the baryon effective masses), and the $k_0$ quadratic scalar term (which governs the curvature of the scalar potential). This framework provides a reproducible, data-driven approach to quantify parameter sensitivities in dense-matter models and to guide future Bayesian inference of nuclear information from multi-messenger astrophysical observations.

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Enhanced Neutrino Cooling from Parity-Doubled Nucleons in Neutron Star Cooling Simulations

Although restoration of chiral symmetry is predicted by quantum chromodynamics to take place at high baryon density, most modeling of neutron star interiors disregards a chiral phase transition. We model neutron star cores with a parity doublet model, which allows for dynamical chiral symmetry restoration and predicts the appearance of the parity partners of nucleons and hyperons at large densities, as well as deconfined quark matter. We study the thermal evolution of neutron stars, focusing for the first time on the impact of Urca processes involving the parity partners in neutron star cooling simulations. We find that Urca processes for the parity partners of the nucleons significantly affect the thermal evolution of massive stars and allow for improved agreement with observed surface temperature and ages.

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Many-body effects on dense matter with hyperons at finite temperature

In this work, we present the first extension of the Many-Body Forces (MBF) Model to finite temperature. The MBF Model describes nuclear matter in a relativistic quantum hadrodynamics formalism that takes many-body forces into account through a field dependence of the nuclear interaction coupling constants. Assuming nuclear matter to be charge neutral, beta-equilibrated, and populated by the baryon octet, electrons, and muons, we explore the parameters of the model, three different hyperon coupling schemes (also introduced here for the first time in MBF), and temperature effects to describe basic properties of nuclear matter, including the speed of sound, compressibility, and adiabatic index. We also investigate the mass-radius relation of compact stars by solving the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations at zero and finite temperature, including scenarios with fixed entropy per baryon. Our original results at finite temperature open the path to a new description of proto-neutron stars.

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Chemical potential differentials in the QCD phase diagram from heavy-ion isobar collisions

Temperature and baryon, charge, and strangeness chemical potentials characterize QCD matter under extreme conditions. Differences between these chemical potentials and their ratios probe conserved-charge correlations and the system's response in the multidimensional QCD phase diagram. We extract these quantities from STAR Ru+Ru and Zr+Zr isobar collisions using a Bayesian thermal analysis of hadron yields, which substantially reduces systematic uncertainties, and compare them with Taylor-expanded lattice-QCD and Chiral Mean Field model predictions. Isobar collisions thus emerge as a precision probe of four-dimensional QCD thermodynamics.

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Relativistic mean-field model with density- and isospin-density-dependent couplings

We present a new hadronic EoS with hyperons built within the relativistic mean-field (RMF) formalism with baryon-density- and isospin-density-dependent couplings. Motivated by microscopic calculations showing density- and isospin-asymmetry-dependence of self-energies, we implement a new form for the baryon-meson couplings. The parameters for the couplings are constrained by a Bayesian analysis, which anchors the model to nuclear saturation properties, chiral effective field theory ($\chi$EFT) predictions for pure neutron matter, heavy-ion collision data, and HALQCD-based hyperon potential calculations at 3-momentum $|\mathbf{k}|=0$ in both isospin-symmetric and pure neutron matter. The resulting EoS satisfies neutron star mass-radius constraints from NICER and GW170817, providing another way to address the hyperon puzzle. The low-density part of the EoS is described via nuclear statistical equilibrium with modern mass tables (AME20/FRDM12, 8244 nuclei), providing a novel and complete general-purpose EoS for astrophysical simulations.

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Recurring region for neutron-star observables

In this letter, we report a novel, somewhat analytical way to produce equations of state (EOSs) that generate particular values of neutron star mass, radius, and tidal deformability. This is possible because our description for the EoS of dense matter can produce recurring regions, small areas where several EoSs cross in the mass-radius and mass-tidal deformability diagrams. We can place recurring regions in desired locations of these diagrams, corresponding e.g., to a given observation. Our prescription is versatile, in the sense that different microscopic models can be used for the low density hadronic phase and high density quark phase, as long as they are connected by a percolation, a description that mimics quark deconfinement and is motivated by QCD. The several EoSs that pass by a recurring region can present different thresholds for the boundaries of the percolation region (different beginning and ending for the quark deconfinement region), as well as different orders for the phase transition at the boundaries. When combining all these features, our prescription allows one not only to produce an EoS that matches an observation, but also one that matches specific chosen criteria for the EoS. The EoSs produced by this new method will be specially suitable for the study of dense-matter properties in future gravitational-wave observations, when both the inspiral and post-merger phase signals will become available. Our numerical code that calculates recurring regions using CompOSE microscopic EoSs is open source and publicly available.

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Impact of magnetic field-driven anisotropies on the equation of state probed in neutron star mergers

Binary neutron star mergers can produce extreme magnetic fields, some of which can lead to strong magnetar-like remnants. While strong magnetic fields have been shown to affect the dynamics of outflows and angular momentum transport in the remnant, they can also crucially alter the properties of nuclear matter probed in the merger. In this work, we provide a first assessment of the latter, determining the strength of the pressure anisotropy caused by Landau level quantization and the anomalous magnetic moment. To this end, we perform the first numerical relativity simulation with a magnetic polarization tensor and a magnetic-field-dependent equation of state using a new algorithm we present here, which also incorporates a mean-field dynamo model to control the magnetic field strength present in the merger remnant. Our results show that -- in the most optimistic case -- corrections to the anisotropy can be in excess of $10\%$, and are potentially largest in the outer layers of the remnant. This work paves the way for a systematic investigation of these effects.

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Axisymmetric Cooling of Neutron Stars with Strong Magnetic Fields

We study the cooling evolution of neutron stars with strong poloidal magnetic fields (with strength not far from observed values) using the full general relativity 2-dimensional \textit{Astreus} code, which solves consistently Einstein's and Maxwell's equations. We find that central magnetic fields with strengths $3-4\times10^{17}$ G, corresponding to surface magnetic fields $7-8\times10^{16}$, can significantly modify the cooling behavior of neutron stars, leading to stars with similar masses but different magnetic fields to exhibit different thermal evolution. We show a non-linear increase in the thermal relaxation time with increasing magnetic fields and that this behavior is associated with the reduction of the Direct Urca process in stars with strong magnetic fields. This is a novel result in which we can observe the magnetic field influence on the thermal evolution of stars, even if it is not strong enough to affect the Fermi distribution of particles.

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An Overview of the MUSES Calculation Engine and How It Can Be Used to Describe Neutron Stars

For densities beyond nuclear saturation, there is still a large uncertainty in the equations of state (EoS) of dense matter that translate into uncertainties in the internal structure of neutron stars. The MUSES Calculation Engine provides a free and open-source composable workflow management system, which allows users to calculate the EoS of dense and hot matter that can be used, e.g. to describe neutron stars. For this work, we make use of two MUSES EoS modules, Crust Density Functional Theory and Chiral Mean Field model, with beta-equilibrium with leptons enforced in the Lepton module, then connected by the Synthesis module using different functions: hyperbolic tangent, Gaussian, bump, and smoothstep. We then calculate stellar structure using the QLIMR module and discuss how the different interpolating functions affect our results.

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Exploring the role of $d^*$ hexaquarks on quark deconfinement and hybrid stars

We investigate the impact of the $d^*$(2380) hexaquark on the equation of state (EoS) of dense matter within hybrid stars (HSs) using the Chiral Mean-Field model (CMF). The hexaquark is included as a new degree of freedom in the hadronic phase, and its influence on the deconfinement transition to quark matter is explored. We re-parametrize the CMF model to ensure compatibility with recent astrophysical constraints, including the observation of massive pulsars and gravitational wave events. Our results show that the presence of $d^*$ significantly modifies the EoS, leading to a softening at high densities and a consequent reduction in the predicted maximum stellar masses. Furthermore, we examine the possibility of a first-order deconfinement phase transition within the context of the extended stability branch of slow stable HSs (SSHSs). We find that the presence of hexaquarks can delay the deconfinement phase transition and reduce the associated energy density gap, affecting the structure and stability of HSs. Our results suggest that, as the hexaquark appearance tends to destabilize stellar configurations, fine tuning of model parameters is required to obtain both the presence of hexaquarks and quark deconfinement in these systems. In this scenario, the SSHS branch plays a crucial role in obtaining HSs with hexaquarks that satisfy current astrophysical constraints. Our work provides new insights into the role of exotic particles like $d^*$ in dense matter and the complex interplay between hadronic and quark degrees of freedom inside compact stellar objects.

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