1303.5380 (Armen Sedrakian)

Rapid cooling of Cas A as a phase transition in dense QCD    [PDF]

Armen Sedrakian

We present a model of the compact star in Cassiopea A, which accommodates its unusually fast cooling behavior. This feature is interpreted as due to an enhancement in the neutrino emission triggered by a transition from fully gapped two-flavor color superconducting phase to a crystalline or an alternative gapless color superconducting phase. By fine-tuning a single parameter -- the temperature of this transition - a specific cooling scenario can be selected that fits the Cas A data. Such scenario requires as a prerequisite a massive M ~ 2M_{sun}$ star and is, therefore, distinctive from models invoking canonical 1.4 M_{sun} mass star with nucleonic pairing only.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5380