Neutron stars in accreting systems – Signatures of the QCD phase transition

Abstract

Neutron stars (NS) that are born in binary systems with a main-sequence star companion can experience mass transfer, resulting in the accumulation of material at the surface of the NS. This, in turn, leads to the continuous growth of the NS mass and the associated steepening of the gravitational potential. Supposing the central density surpasses the onset for the phase transition from nuclear, generally hadronic matter to deconfined quark-gluon plasma, which is a quantity currently constrained solely from an upper limit by asymptotic freedom in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the system may experience a dynamic response due to the appearance of additional degrees of freedom in the equation of state (EOS). This dynamical response might give rise to a rapid softening of the EOS during the transition in the hadron-quark matter co-existence region. While this phenomenon has long been studied in the context of hydrostatic configurations, the dynamical implications of this problem are still incompletely understood. It is the purpose of the present paper to simulate the dynamics of NSs with previously accreted envelopes caused by the presence of a first-order QCD phase transition. Therefore, we employed the neutrino radiation hydrodynamics treatment based on the fully general relativistic approach in spherical symmetry, implementing a three-flavor Boltzmann neutrino transport and a microscopic model EOS that contains a first-order hadron-quark phase transition. The associated neutrino signal shows a sudden rise in the neutrino fluxes and average energies, becoming observable for the present generation of neutrino detectors for a galactic event, and a gravitational wave mode analysis revealed the behaviors of the dominant f mode and the first and the second gravity g modes that are excited during the NS evolution across the QCD phase transition.