High-density nuclear symmetry energy extracted from astrophysical observations

摘要

The density dependence of nuclear symmetry energy is the most uncertain part of the Equation of Sate (EOS) of neutron-rich nucleonic matter at supra-saturation densities. To pin down the latter has been a longstanding and shared goal of both nuclear physics and astrophysics. In this contribution, we summarize the main findings originally published in refs. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] regrading (1) what we have learned so far about the radii of neutron stars and (2) what we have extracted about the high-density nuclear symmetry energy from the radii and the currently known maximum mass of neutron stars. For more details on these studies, we refer the reader to the original publications and/or the comprehensive review in ref. [6].