Confronting strange stars with compact-star observations and new physics

Strange stars ought to exist in the universe according to the strange quark matter hypothesis, which states that matter made of roughly equal numbers of up, down, and strange quarks could be the true ground state of baryonic matter rather than ordinary atomic nuclei. Theoretical models of strange quark matter, such as the standard MIT bag model, the density-dependent quark mass model, or the quasi-particle model, however, appear to be unable to reproduce some of the properties (masses, radii and tidal deformabilities) of recently observed compact stars. This is different if alternative gravity theory (e.g., non-Newtonian gravity) or dark matter (e.g., mirror dark matter) are considered, which resolve these issues. The possible existence of strange stars could thus provide a clue to new physics, as discussed in this review.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures. Review paper accepted for publication in Univers

Radiative viscosity of neutron stars

We study non-linear effects of radiative viscosity of $npe$ matter in neutron stars for both direct Urca process and modified Urca process, and find that non-linear effects will decrease the ratio of radiative viscosity to bulk viscosity from 1.5 to 0.5 (for direct Urca process) and 0.375 (for modified Urca process). Which means that for small oscillations of neutron star, the large fraction of oscillation energy is emitted as neutrinos; but for large enough ones, bulk viscous dissipation dominates.Comment: 11pages, 4 figure

The role of rr-mode damping in the thermal evolution of neutron stars

The thermal evolution of neutron stars (NSs) is investigated by coupling with the evolution of $\textit{r}$-mode instability that is described by a second order model.The heating effect due to shear viscous damping of the $\textit{r}$-modes enables us to understand the high temperature of two young pulsars (i.e., PSR B0531+21 and RX J0822-4300) in the framework of the simple $npe$ NS model, without superfluidity or exotic particles.Moreover, the light curves predicted by the model within an acceptable parameter regime may probably cover all of the young and middle-aged pulsars in the $\lg T_s^{\infty}-\lg t$ panel, and an artificially strong $p$ superfluidity invoked in some early works is not needed here. Additionally, by considering the radiative viscous damping of the $\textit{r}$-modes, a surprising extra cooling effect is found, which can even exceed the heating effect sometimes although plays an ignorable role in the thermal history.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure