No abstract

The braneworld scenario, based on the fact that the four dimension space-time is a hyper-surface of a five dimensional manifold, was shown to deal in a satisfactory way with the hierarchy problem. In this work we study macroscopic stellar properties of compact stars from the braneworld point of view. Using neutron star equations of state, we test the possibility of extra dimensions by solving the brane Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations obtained for three kinds of possible compact objects: hadronic, hybrid and quark stars. By comparing the macroscopic solutions with observational constraints, we establish a brane tension lower limit and the value for which the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations in the braneworld converge to the usual Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations.

In this paper, we calculate the diffusion coefficients that are related to the neutrino opacities considering the formation of nuclear pasta and homogeneous matter at low densities. Our results show that the mean free paths are significantly altered by the presence of nuclear pasta in stellar matter when compared with the results obtained with homogeneous matter. These differences in neutrino opacities certainly influence the Kelvin-Helmholtz phase of protoneutron stars and consequently the results of supernova explosion simulations.

Different extensions of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, known to satisfy expected QCD chiral symmetry aspects, are used to investigate a possible hadron-quark phase transition at zero temperature and to build the corresponding binodal sections. We have shown that the transition point is very sensitive to the model parameters and that both pressure and chemical potential increase drastically with the increase of the vector interaction strength in the quark sector. Within the same framework, the possibility of quark and hybrid star formation is analyzed. The same conclusions drawn before with respect to the coexistence pressure and chemical potentials are reinforced. We conclude that even if a transition from a metastable hadronic star to a quark star is thermodinamically possible, it is either energetically forbidden or gives rise to a blackhole. Nevertheless, conversions from metastable to hybrid stars are possible, but the mass difference between both compact objects is very small, never larger than 0.2 M ⊙ .

We show that the widely used density dependent magnetic field prescriptions, necessary to account for the variation of the field intensity from the crust to the core of neutron stars violate one of the Maxwell equations. We estimate how strong the violation is when different equations of state are used and check for which cases the pathological problem can be cured. We then propose a simple solution that allows for the usual prescriptions to be used without violating a fundamental equation of physics.