Engineering topics

Gorda, Tyler

Publications and source records attributed to Gorda, Tyler.

6 records

DOE OSTI2024

Equation of state at neutron-star densities and beyond from perturbative QCD

We explore the consequences of imposing robust thermodynamic constraints arising from perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) when inferring the dense-matter equation-of-state (EOS). We find that the termination density, up to which the EOS modeling is performed in an inference setup, strongly affects the constraining power of the QCD input. This sensitivity in the constraining power arises from EOSs that have a specific form, with drastic softening immediately above the termination density followed by a strong stiffening. Here we also perform explicit modeling of the EOS down from perturbative-QCD densities to construct a new QCD likelihood function that incorporates additional perturbative-QCD calculations of the sound speed and is insensitive to the termination density, which we make publicly available.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2022

The LPM effect in sequential bremsstrahlung: incorporation of “instantaneous” interactions for QCD

The splitting processes of bremsstrahlung and pair production in a medium are coherent over large distances in the very high energy limit, which leads to a suppression known as the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect. We continue study of the case when the coherence lengths (formation lengths) of two consecutive splitting processes overlap, avoiding soft-emission approximations. Previous work made a “nearly-complete” calculation of the effect of overlapping formation times on gluonic splittings such as g → gg → ggg (with simplifying assumptions such as an infinite QCD medium and the large-N c limit). In this paper, we extend those previous rate calculations from nearly-complete to complete by including processes involving the exchange of longitudinally-polarized gluons. In the context of Lightcone Pertubation Theory, used earlier for the “nearly-complete” calculation, such exchanges are instantaneous in lightcone time and have their own diagrammatic representation.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

DOE OSTI2022

The LPM effect in sequential bremsstrahlung: analytic results for sub-leading (single) logarithms

Consider the in-medium splitting g → gg of a very high-energy gluon traversing a QCD medium, accounting for the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect. It has been known for some time that soft radiative corrections to that splitting generate a double-log correction to the splitting rate, whose effects can be absorbed into running of the medium parameter $\hat{q}$ describing the rate of transverse momentum kicks to high-energy particles due to small-angle scattering from the medium. Less has been known about sub-leading, single logarithms in this context. In this paper, we find analytic formulas for those single logs (with various caveats and clarifications).

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

DOE OSTI2021

The Problem of overlapping formation times: In-medium virtual corrections for QCD

High energy particles traversing through medium primarily lose energy by showering through hard bremsstrahlung and pair production. These splitting processes are coherent over large distances in the very high energy limit, leading to suppression from the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect. Avoiding soft-emission approximations, we study the cases where the coherence lengths of two consecutive splittings overlap (which is important for calculating corrections to LPM effect in QCD). Here, we will show how to compute in-medium virtual corrections to the leading order LPM emission rates for QCD. These loop corrections will be necessary for calculating properties of in-medium high energy parton showers. To simplify the calculations, we will focus on the all-gluon case and work in the large-Nc limit of QCD, where Nc is the number of colors.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

DOE OSTI2020

The LPM effect in sequential bremsstrahlung: nearly complete results for QCD

The splitting processes of bremsstrahlung and pair production in a medium are coherent over large distances in the very high energy limit, which leads to a suppression known as the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect. We continue study of the case when the coherence lengths of two consecutive splitting processes overlap (which is important for understanding corrections to standard treatments of the LPM effect in QCD), avoiding soft-emission approximations. Previous work has computed overlap effects for double splitting g → gg → ggg. To make use of those results, one also needs calculations of related virtual loop corrections to single splitting g → gg in order to cancel severe (power-law) infrared (IR) divergences. This paper provides calculations of nearly all such processes involving gluons and discusses how to organize the results to demonstrate the cancellation. In the soft emission limit, our results reproduce the known double-log behavior of earlier authors who worked in leading-log approximation. We also present a first (albeit numerical and not yet analytic) investigation of sub-leading, single IR logarithms. Ultraviolet divergences appearing in our calculations correctly renormalize the coupling αs in the usual LPM result for leading-order g → gg.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

DOE OSTI2020

Evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars

The theory governing the strong nuclear force—quantum chromodynamics—predicts that at sufficiently high energy densities, hadronic nuclear matter undergoes a deconfinement transition to a new phase of quarks and gluons. Although this has been observed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions, it is currently an open question whether quark matter exists inside neutron stars. By combining astrophysical observations and theoretical ab initio calculations in a model-independent way, we find that the inferred properties of matter in the cores of neutron stars with mass corresponding to 1.4 solar masses (M ⊙ ) are compatible with nuclear model calculations. However, the matter in the interior of maximally massive stable neutron stars exhibits characteristics of the deconfined phase, which we interpret as evidence for the presence of quark-matter cores. For the heaviest reliably observed neutron stars with mass M ≈ 2M ⊙ , the presence of quark matter is found to be linked to the behaviour of the speed of sound cs in strongly interacting matter. If the conformal bound ${c}_{\rm{s}}^{2}\le 1/3$ is not strongly violated, massive neutron stars are predicted to have sizable quark-matter cores. This finding has important implications for the phenomenology of neutron stars and affects the dynamics of neutron star mergers with at least one sufficiently massive participant.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗