Neutron stars with a crossover equation of state

Understand

The question of whether quark matter exists in neutron stars is a long standing one.

• Generally one finds that a first order phase transition from baryons to quarks softens the equation of state so much that the star would collapse into a black hole.
• We consider a crossover equation of state, similar to the crossover that is found in lattice QCD studies at finite temperature and zero or small baryon chemical potentials.
• We find that with reasonable parameters it may be possible to support neutron stars up to about 2.2 solar masses.