Exploring thermal effects of the hadron-quark matter transition in neutron star mergers

Understand

We study the importance of the thermal behavior of the hadron-quark phase transition in neutron star (NS) mergers.

• To this end, we devise a new scheme approximating thermal effects to supplement any cold, barotropic hybrid equation of state (EoS) model, i.e.
• two-phase EoS constructions with a hadronic regime and a phase of deconfined quark matter.
• The consideration of temperature-dependent phase boundaries turns out to be critical for a quantitative description of quark matter effects in NS mergers, since the coexistence phase can introduce a strong softening of the EoS at finite temperature, which is even more significant than the change of the EoS by the phase transition at T=0.