Invitation to public lecture "Neutron stars and gravitational waves. Probing matter under extreme conditions"

It is our pleasure to invite you to the public lecture entitled

"Neutron stars and gravitational waves. Probing matter under extreme conditions"
by Prof. Jürgen Schaffner-Bielich from Goethe Universität of Frankfurt, Germany.

The lecture will take place on Wednesday 15^th February at 17:30

at the Aula Magna of the Department of Physics and Astronomy “A.Righi”, via Irnerio 46.

The lecture, in English, is open to everybody within the limit of the available seats.

Please, read the abstract below.

The poster of the event is attached.

ABSTRACT

Neutron stars are the endpoint of the evolution of massive stars, where the core collapses in a brilliant supernova outshining a whole galaxy for a brief moment. The properties of neutron stars are so extraordinary that they provide a testbed of our understanding of gravity and fundamental interactions of matter under extreme conditions. At present more than 3000 pulsars are known which are rotating neutron stars. Some of them have a companion star so that their masses can be determined quite accurately after taking into account effects from general relativity due to the large curvature of spacetime.

The detection of gravitational waves from a neutron star merger by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration has opened new era of multimessenger astronomy. These and other recent observations have shown that neutron stars are not only quite heavy but also very compact having radii of less than 13 km.

Hence, the matter in the inner part of a neutron star could be so dense that the particles could dissolve into their constituents, quarks, forming quark matter in the core.

In this lecture, I will discuss the exploration of quark matter by the observation of pulsars, the measurement of gravitational waves from neutron star mergers and from the Big Bang, as well as by experiments with heavy-ion collisions at particle accelerators such as at the Large Hadron Collider of CERN, Geneva and at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research at GSI, Darmstadt.

BIO

Prof. Juergen Schaffner-Bielich is a theoretical physicist and lecturer in astrophysics, cosmology and heavy-ion physics at the University of Frankfurt. His present research focuses on the equation of state for neutron star mergers and the properties of twin stars, compact stars with a phase transition in their core.