CASUS Institute Seminar, Prof. David Blaschke, Center for Advanced Systems Understanding CASUS, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR)
David obtained his PhD in physics and holds honorary doctor titles from the State University Dubna and the Russian- Armenian University Yerevan. In 2020, he became the Vice Director for Research at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Wroclaw and joined CASUS in 2022.
Abstract of the talk// Density functional methods have been successfully applied to describe properties of atomic nuclei and infinite nuclear matter. A particularly successful approach for applications in simulations of neutron stars, their mergers and supernova explosions is the relativistic mean field theory with density dependent couplings (DD2). For densities exceeding twice the nuclear saturation density, i.e. for neutron stars heavier than about 1.4 solar masses, the excitation of hyperons and heavy baryons leads to a softening of the nuclear equation of state and a limitation of the maximum neutron star mass to about 2 solar masses (“Berlin wall” constraint, formerly known as the hyperon puzzle), at tension with recent mass measurements.
In his talk, David will review recent progress to overcome the Berlin wall constraint with quark deconfinement in neutron star interiors, where the dense quark matter equation of state is obtained from a relativistic density functional approach that allows to model quark confinement at low densities as well as color superconductivity and the transition to the conformal symmetric phase at high densities.
On the basis of this new density functional approach to quark matter a supernova explosion mechanism for massive blue supergiant stars has been suggested and a signal of quark deconfinement in the pattern of gravitational waves from binary neutron star mergers.
David shall give an outlook to the development of a unified description of quark-nuclear matter in the form of a density functional approach.
David will be talking live in Görlitz. However, as the event is organized in a hybrid format that includes a videoconferencing tool by Zoom Inc., people interested in the topic have the chance to also join the talk remotely. Please ask for the login details via contact@casus.science.