Conformality and percolation threshold in neutron stars

Abstract

Speed of sound is given attention in multi-messenger astronomy as it encodes information of the dense matter equation of state. Recently the trace anomaly was proposed as a more informative quantity. In this work, we statistically determine the speed of sound and trace anomaly and show that they are driven to their conformal values at the centers of maximally massive neutron stars. We show that the local peak in the speed of sound can be associated deconfinement along with percolation conditions in QCD matter.