Speaker
Description
At high densities and low temperatures, hadronic matter is expected to undergo a first-order phase transition into a color-superconducting state. While such conditions occur in neutron stars, studies focusing only on cold neutron stars are not fully conclusive because they neglect the evolutionary processes that may influence the appearance of color-superconducting phases. A proto–neutron star, however, describes the earliest evolutionary stages during the first seconds to minutes after core collapse and therefore has different thermodynamic properties compared to a cold neutron star — in particular higher temperatures and trapped neutrinos. To address this, we incorporate proto–neutron star conditions into the equation of state. Since the total baryon number of a neutron star is conserved during its early evolution, tracking stellar configurations from the maximum mass of the hot proto–neutron star to the final cold neutron star allows us to investigate whether color-superconducting phases can form at any point along this trajectory.