Pulsars could be strangeon stars

Speaker: Renxin Xu, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China

Human beings are curious about the material world since civilization, to link macro-phenomena to micro-statistics. Beyond question, the Fermi-Dirac statistics of electrons is the key, which was soon applied successfully to understand the nature of matter, and it is not surprising that the subject of condensed matter physics dominates in the physics department at any university. Such so familiar stuff is condensed by the electromagnetic force. Nevertheless, is there a kind of matter by the elementary strong force? Certainly, atomic nuclei are “drops” of strong matter, with building units of nucleons. What about the basic units of a “gigantic nucleus” with baryon number, A, larger than a thousand? My answer is “strangeon”, and strong matter with large A, from maybe 10^5 to 10^57, could then be strangeon matter. I would like to explain the physics and astrophysics of strangeon matter in this talk, focusing on strangeon stars governed by gravity in this multi-messenger era, especially of gravitational waves.