The research project ‘Investigation of compact stars with heavy baryons and quarks’ by FIAS Fellow Armen Sedrakian entered its third funding period in May 2024. The German Research Foundation (DFG) approved the application for research funding for a further two years.

Sedrakian's new project aims to help better understand the nuclear systems in general and, more specifically, the properties of compact stars. In an extension of the work carried out in the previous periods, the research will now focus on the link between the first-principle description at the level of elementary particles (nucleons) and a more macroscopic description based on a phenomenological relation between the density and energy of the system. With this insight, the team will analyze the properties of compact stars (mass, radius, etc) consisting of nucleons and their more massive sisters known as hyperons (collectively known as baryons). The team will also investigate the possibility that the baryons are crashed into their constituents  - quarks - at very high densities reached in compact stars.

“We hope to gain a better understanding of the deep interiors of compact stars through a combination of theoretical work with observations carried out in terrestrial laboratories, and with telescopes on Earth and its orbit”, says Sedrakian.