Seminar

Superconducting phases in neutron star interiors

By
Vanessa Graber (IEEC)
Date
Place
Zoom
seminar ICCUB
Neutron stars unite many extremes of physics which cannot be recreated on Earth, making them excellent cosmic laboratories to study dense matter. One exciting characteristic is the presence of superfluid and superconducting components in mature neutron stars. Albeit created under very different circumstances, such macroscopic quantum behaviour exhibits many similarities with terrestrial condensates such as superfluid phases in helium, ultra-cold atomic gases, heavy-ion collisions or superconducting transitions in metals. In this talk, I will focus on the last relationship and discuss how we can describe the interiors of neutron stars by means of a two-component Ginzburg-Landau model, a framework well-known from the study of laboratory superconductors. By adapting this description to the neutron star interior and connecting it with realistic superfluid parameters and equations of state (specifically the Skyrme functional), we are able to determine the equilibrium properties of the superconducting component throughout the entire neutron star core. I will present the phase diagrams resulting from these analyses and discuss how our new approach can provide insights into the microphysical magnetic flux distribution in neutron star interiors.