INTERACTING QUARK MATTER EQUATION OF STATE FOR COMPACT STARS

Lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) studies of the thermodynamics of hot quark-gluon plasma demonstrate the importance of accounting for the interactions of quarks and gluons if one wants to investigate the phase structure of strongly interacting matter. Motivated by this observation and using state-of-the-art results from perturbative QCD, we construct a simple, effective equation of state (EOS) for cold quark matter that consistently incorporates the effects of interactions and furthermore includes a built-in estimate of the inherent systematic uncertainties. This goes beyond the MIT bag model description in a crucial way, yet leads to an EOS that is equally straightforward to use. We also demonstrate that, at moderate densities, our EOS can be made to smoothly connect to hadronic EOSs, with the two exhibiting very similar behavior near the matching region. The resulting hybrid stars are seen to have masses similar to those predicted by the purely nucleonic EOSs.