Speaker
Description
As our understanding of cold, extremely dense matter grows, a multidisciplinary approach that combines recent progress in multimessenger neutron-star observations with theoretical knowledge of the equation of state (EoS) becomes increasingly essential. In this talk, I present a new physically motivated framework for encoding prior knowledge about dense matter arising from chiral effective field theory and perturbative quantum chromodynamics.
The new method generates model-agnostic, nonparametric priors for neutron-star EoS inference that are stable, causal, and thermodynamically consistent by construction. It generalizes Gaussian processes and is based on constructing constrained Brownian bridges, whose correlation properties can be tuned at will, allowing flexibility between conservative priors and theory-informed priors. Unlike existing nonparametric approaches, it does not rely on shooting procedures, intermediate likelihoods, or ad hoc switching between EoS representations.
