Viscous Dissipation and Heat Conduction in Binary Neutron-Star Mergers.

Inferring the properties of dense matter is one of the most exciting prospects from the measurement of gravitational waves from neutron star mergers. However, it requires reliable numerical simulations that incorporate viscous dissipation and energy transport as these can play a significant role in the survival time of the post-merger object. We calculate time scales for typical forms of dissipation and find that thermal transport and shear viscosity will not be important unless neutrino trapping occurs, which requires temperatures above 10 MeV and gradients over length scales of 0.1 km or less. On the other hand, if direct-Urca processes remain suppressed, leaving modified-Urca processes to establish flavor equilibrium, then bulk viscous dissipation could provide significant damping to density oscillations right after merger. When comparing with data from state-of-the-art merger simulations, we find that the bulk viscosity takes values close to its resonant maximum in a typical merger, motivating a more careful assessment of the role of bulk viscous dissipation in the gravitational-wave signal from merging neutron stars.

What the timing of millisecond pulsars can teach us about their interior.

The cores of compact stars reach the highest densities in nature and therefore could consist of novel phases of matter. We demonstrate via a detailed analysis of pulsar evolution that precise pulsar timing data can constrain the star's composition, through unstable global oscillations (r modes) whose damping is determined by microscopic properties of the interior. If not efficiently damped, these modes emit gravitational waves that quickly spin down a millisecond pulsar. As a first application of this general method, we find that ungapped interacting quark matter is consistent with both the observed radio and x-ray data, whereas for ordinary nuclear matter some additional enhanced damping mechanism is required.

Bridging the gap by squeezing superfluid matter.

Cooper pairing between fermions in dense matter leads to the formation of a gap in the fermionic excitation spectrum and typically exponentially suppresses transport properties. However, we show here that reactions involving conversion between different fermion species, such as Urca reactions in nuclear matter, become strongly enhanced and approach their ungapped level when the matter undergoes density oscillations of sufficiently large amplitude. We study both the neutrino emissivity and the bulk viscosity due to direct Urca processes in hadronic, hyperonic, and quark matter and discuss different superfluid and superconducting pairing patterns.

Low-energy dynamics in ultradegenerate QCD matter.

We study the low-energy behavior of QCD Green functions in the limit that the baryon chemical potential is much larger than the QCD scale parameter LambdaQCD. We show that there is a systematic low-energy expansion in powers of (omega/m)(1/3), where omega is the energy and m is the screening scale. This expansion is valid even if the effective quark-gluon coupling g is not small. The expansion is purely perturbative in the magnetic regime |k| >> k0. If the external momenta and energies satisfy |k| approximately k0, planar, Abelian ladder diagrams involving the full quark propagator have to be resummed but the corresponding Dyson-Schwinger equations are closed.