Book Description

Abstract: Neutron stars are among the densest objects in the universe. The uncertainty of the internal structure of these stars have led to various methods for modeling the behavior of matter at high density. In order to study the structure of compact stars, the Tolman- Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) equations are solved to yield Mass-Radius curves of different neutron star structures. Such different structures investigated in this paper include stars of pure nuclear matter, stars of pure quark matter, and hybrid stars. These classes of stars are probably the only place in the universe where deconfined quark matter could exist. Because of the possibility of quark deconfinement, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) plays an important role in modeling the core of these stars. Although QCD is unsolved, we can still use some of the main principles to obtain some possible Equations of State (EoS) to be used in conjunction with the TOV equations. Although the EoS of the neutron star core is the bulk of this paper, we investigate the strange matter hypothesis, the masquerade of hybrid stars as nuclear stars, and the flavor camouflage in phase transitions, all through the use of the Vector Interaction Enhanced Bag Model (vBag). In the end, the results of this paper can be used in conjunction with observational astronomical data to constrain the equation of state for neutron stars. Since these compact stars are likely the only objects in the universe where the extreme density allows for quark deconfinement, it also provides us with one way to test out the QCD and QFT framework for high density nuclear matter.