Informal Pizza Seminar

Mass-radius relations for solitonic stars

Prashanth Jaikumar

Argonne National Laboratory

We present mass-radius relations for neutron stars employing an equation of state based on a fluid of Skyrmions. This model is based on a chiral theory that accommodates the nucleon as a solitonic assembly of mesons. We obtain gravitationally stable configurations for densities upto a few times nuclear matter density, and find that the equation of state supports large mass, which has some recent observational support. Within the same model, we also discuss the dominant neutrino emissivity and the cooling of skyrmion stars with a nuclear crust.