Colloquium - From Nuclei to Neutron Stars with Chiral Effective Field Theory and Multimessenger Astrophysics with Ingo Tews

Speaker

Ingo Tews

Abstract

Neutron stars contain the largest reservoirs of degenerate fermions, reaching the highest densities we can observe in the cosmos, and probe matter under conditions that cannot be recreated in terrestrial experiments. Throughout the Universe, a large number of high-energy, cataclysmic astrophysical collisions of neutron stars are continuously occurring and provide an excellent testbed to probe the properties of matter at densities exceeding the density inside atomic nuclei. In addition, these phenomena allow us to test theories of strong interactions. In this talk, I will show how to combine nuclear theory calculations using chiral effective field theory and quantum Monte Carlo methods with data from astrophysical multi-messenger observations of neutron stars to improve our understanding of dense matter. This work combines nuclear theory, nuclear experiment, and astrophysical observations, and shows how joint analyses can shed light on the properties of neutron-rich supranuclear matter over the density range probed in neutron stars.