A phase of strong interacting matter with deconfined quarks is expected in the core of massive neutron stars. In this article, we perform a study of the hadron-quark phase transition in cold ($T=0$) neutron star matter and we calculate various structural properties of hybrid stars. For the quark phase, we make use of an equation of state (EOS) derived with the field correlator method (FCM) recently extended to the case of nonzero baryon density. For the hadronic phase, we consider both pure nucleonic and hyperonic matter, and we derive the corresponding EOS within a relativistic mean field approach. We make use of measured neutron star masses, and particularly the mass $M=1.97\pm 0.04M_{\odot }$ of PSR $\mathrm{J}1614-2230$ to constrain the values of the gluon condensate $G_2$, which is one of the EOS parameters within the FCM. We find that the values of $G_2$ extracted from the mass measurement of PSR $\mathrm{J}1614-2230$ are consistent with the values of the same quantity derived within the FCM from recent lattice QCD calculations of the deconfinement transition temperature at zero baryon chemical potential. The FCM thus provides a powerful tool to link numerical calculations of QCD on a space-time lattice with measured neutron star masses.

• Received 21 May 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.88.063001