Terrestrial experiments to understand what is inside neutron stars

by Prof. Laura Fabbietti (TU Munich)

Tuesday 21 Feb 2017, 16:15 → 17:15 Europe/Berlin

Auditorium (MPI Meeting rooms)

Many physicists would like to know what is inside neutron stars (NS). Others would be already very happy if they could understand how two and three baryons interact with better accuracy than available today. The two things are intertwined since the two and three body hadron interaction determines the equation of state, hence how pressure and energy depend on density, for every hadron system. Different hypotheses can be made about the content of NS. The scenarios vary from pure dense neutron matter, to mixtures of neutrons and strange hadrons up to quark matter. Each hypothesis, provided that the interaction among the constituents is well known, leads to an equation of state and to a precise mass to radius relationship for the NS. This way, observations of masses and radii for NS can test different hypotheses. A new method is proposed to exploit particle production at accelerator experiments to substitute scattering experiments among different hadron species. This idea can also open up the possibility of studying three body interactions among hadrons. First results from the HADES and ALICE collaborations, two experiments at very different beam energies, will be shown and the potential of the method will be discussed.