Thermal twin stars within a hybrid equation of state based on a nonlocal chiral quark model compatible with modern astrophysical observations

Abstract

We investigate the extension to finite temperatures and neutrino chemical potentials of a recently developed nonlocal chiral quark model approach to the equation of state of neutron star matter. We consider two light quark flavors and current-current interactions in the scalar-pseudoscalar, vector, and diquark pairing channels, where the nonlocality of the currents is taken into account by a Gaussian form factor that depends on the spatial components of the 4-momentum. Within this framework, we analyze order parameters, critical temperatures, phase diagrams, equations of state, and mass-radius relations for different temperatures and neutrino chemical potentials. For parameters of the model that are constrained by recent multi-messenger observations of neutron stars, we find that the mass-radius diagram for isothermal hybrid star sequences exhibits the thermal twin phenomenon for temperatures above 30 MeV.