Nuclear physics aspects of neutron stars

NUCL 1

Jorge Piekarewicz, jorgep@scs.fsu.edu, Department of Physics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4350
The finite nucleus - a system that is 18 order of magnitude smaller and 55 orders of magnitude lighter than a neutron star - may be used as a miniature surrogate to establish important correlations between its neutron skin and several neutron-star properties. Indeed, a nearly model-independent correlation develops between the neutron skin of 208Pb and the transition density between the liquid mantle and the solid crust in the neutron star. The implications of the proposed purely electroweak Parity Radius EXperiment (PREX) at the Jefferson Laboratory on neutron-star structure will be reviewed and connections to other fields, such as atomic and condensed-matter physics, will be established.