Density functional approach to neutron star astrophysics

Density functional methods have been successfully applied to describe properties of atomic nuclei and infinite nuclear matter. A particularly successful approach for applications in simulations of neutron stars, their mergers and supernova explosions is the relativistic mean field theory with density dependent couplings (DD2). For densities exceeding twice the nuclear saturation density, i.e. for neutron stars heavier than about 1.4 solar masses, the excitation of hyperons and heavy baryons leads to a softening of the nuclear equation of state and a limitation of the maximum neutron star mass to about 2 solar masses (“Berlin wall” constraint, formerly known as the hyperon puzzle), a tension with recent mass measurements.
I will review recent progress to overcome the Berlin wall constraint with quark deconfinement in neutron star interiors, where the dense quark matter equation of state is obtained from a relativistic density functional approach that allows to model quark confinement at low densities as well as color superconductivity and the transition to the conformal symmetric phase at high densities.
On the basis of this new density functional approach to quark matter a supernova explosion mechanism for massive blue supergiant stars has been suggested and a signal of quark deconfinement in the pattern of gravitational waves from binary neutron star mergers.
I shall give an outlook to the development of a unified description of quark-nuclear matter in the form of a density functional approach.