Speaker: Prof. James LATTIMER
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, SUNY at Stony Brook

"NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE STRUCTURE AND EVOLUTION OF NEUTRON STARS"


Neutron stars are the densest objects in the universe, having central
 densities several times greater than those found in atomic nuclei and
 a million times larger than found in white dwarfs. They are ideal 
astrophysical laboratories to test theories of dense matter physics and
 provide connections among nuclear physics, particle physics and 
astrophysics. Such matter may exhibit phenomena and conditions not observed
 anywhere else, such as hyperon-dominated matter, deconfined strange quark
 matter, superfluidity and superconductivity, opaqueness to neutrinos, and
 extreme magnetic fields. This talk will summarize how neutron stars are
 formed, their structure and composition, and their evolution. It will focus
 on recent observations, including radio and X-ray studies of binary pulsars,
 thermal emission from isolated neutron stars, and glitches from pulsars, 
and detail the inferences for neutron star masses, radii, temperatures, 
ages and internal compositions. The implications for the properties of 
dense nuclear and neutron star matter are highlighted.