Speaker
Description
The behavior of strongly interacting matter at supranuclear densities and the nature of the associated deconfinement phase transition remain central open problems in nuclear physics and astrophysics. Such extreme conditions are realized in compact stars and related phenomena.
A key uncertainty concerns the energy per baryon of strange quark matter (SQM) relative to that of iron at zero pressure and temperature, which determines whether SQM is absolutely stable. If so, as proposed by the Bodmer–Witten hypothesis, bulk hadronic matter is only metastable and SQM represents the true ground state of strongly interacting matter, enabling the coexistence of a family of metastable neutron stars (NSs) and stable strange quark stars (QSs) in the so-called two-families scenario.
I am interested in investigating the decay of the metastable hadronic phase via nucleation, which triggers the conversion of NSs into QSs.
I will discuss a new nucleation scheme for SQM and specify the role of metastability and nonequilibrium effects in first-order phase transitions.
This framework is applied to proto-neutron star evolution to identify the thermodynamic conditions under which NSs convert into QSs and to test the possibility that NSs and QSs coexist. Possible future applications to binary compact star mergers and core-collapse supernova simulations are also discussed.
