Inside the inner cores of neutron stars, matter reaches densities higher than in any other accessible system in our present-day Universe, greatly surpassing even the density of individual atomic nuclei. Whether these conditions are extreme enough for ordinary nuclear matter to undergo a phase transition into a new form of matter consisting of free quarks and gluons remains, however, an open question. In the proposed project, we will perform detailed calculations in thermal quantum field theory to predict the thermodynamic properties of such cold quark matter at a dramatically improved accuracy, which will then be used to constrain the properties of neutron-star cores. This progress is expected to eventually lead to a firm discovery (or ruling out) of the presence of quark-matter cores inside massive neutron stars, thus answering one of the most important open questions in modern nuclear astrophysics.

2023

2027