2020-01-31

As ABBL/iTHEMS seminars, Dr. Hajime SOTANI gave a talk about "Neutron stars and nuclear saturation parameters" on 24th January. So far, many equations of state (EOSs) for neutron star matter are proposed, but the EOS is not fixed yet. This is mainly because the difficulty to obtain the information for high density region via terrestrial experiments. Thus, as an inverse problem, neutron stars are a suitable laboratory for probing the nuclear properties in the high density region. In this talk, it has been discussed the possibility for constraining the nuclear saturation parameters via the neutron star observations, especially focusing on the low-mass neutron stars. Any EOSs can be expanded in the vicinity of the saturation point as a function of the baryon number density, where the expansion coefficients correspond to the saturation parameters. So, each EOS has an own set of saturation parameters. Among the saturation parameters, the incompressibility (K0) for symmetric nuclear matter and the so-called slope parameter (L) for pure neutron matter are relatively difficult to constrain, because these are a kind of the derivative around the saturation point. Thus, in particular these two saturation parameters have been focused in this talk. In addition, the EOSs for high density region can not be expressed well only with the saturation parameters, but one may be able to discuss the EOSs with the saturation parameters up to twice the saturation density. In practice, by systematically examining the masses of low-mass neutron stars constructed with various EOSs up to twice the saturation density, the suitable combination of K0 and L for expressing well the low-mass neutron stars has been found successfully, i.e., eta^3 = (K0 * L^2). That is, the neutron star mass and gravitational redshift can be expressed well as a function of eta and the stellar central density. This is suggested that the value of eta and central density could be constrained via the simultaneous observations of neutron star mass and gravitational redshift. Furthermore, using eta, the possible maximum mass of neutron stars has been discussed together with the constraint obtained from the gravitational wave event, GW170817, and NICER observation.