GEOPHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, AND ASTROPHYSICS |
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Differentiating Neutron Star Models by X-Ray Polarimetry |
LU Ji-Guang1, XU Ren-Xin1**, FENG Hua2 |
1School of Physics and State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, Peking University, Beijing 100871 2Department of Engineering Physics and Center for Astrophysics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084
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Cite this article: |
LU Ji-Guang, XU Ren-Xin, FENG Hua 2013 Chin. Phys. Lett. 30 059501 |
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Abstract The nature of pulsars is still unknown because of the non-perturbative effects of the fundamental strong interaction, so various models of pulsar inner structures are suggested, either for conventional neutron stars or quark stars. Additionally, a quark-cluster matter state is conjectured for cold matter at supranuclear density, and as a result pulsars can be quark-cluster stars. Besides understanding the different manifestations, the most important issue is to find an effective way to observationally differentiate these models. X-ray polarimetry plays an important role here. The thermal x-ray polarization of quark/quark-cluster stars is focused on, and while the thermal x-ray linear polarization percentage is typically higher than ~10% in normal neutron star models, the percentage of quark/quark-cluster stars is almost zero. This could then be an effective method to identify quark/quark-cluster stars by soft x-ray polarimetry. We are therefore expecting to detect thermal x-ray polarization in the coming decades.
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Received: 07 February 2013
Published: 31 May 2013
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PACS: |
95.55.Qf
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(Photometric, polarimetric, and spectroscopic instrumentation)
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97.60.Gb
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(Pulsars)
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26.60.Kp
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(Equations of state of neutron-star matter)
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95.55.Ka
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(X- and γ-ray telescopes and instrumentation)
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95.75.Hi
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(Polarimetry)
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