Speaker
Description
Phenomenological models which make use of energy density functionals (EDFs) represent the reference choice nowadays for an unified treatment of the neutron star matter Equation of State. Nevertheless, the empirical character reduces the predictive power of these approaches, when applied beyond the domain on which they have been determined.
As a common drawback, for example, phenomenological EDFs usually adopted in astrophysical simulations do not reproduce the behavior of pure neutron matter in the very dilute regime, where the well-known Lee-Yang expansion, properly described by construction within effective-field-theory (EFT), is known to hold at zero temperature.
In the last years, several attempts have been made to bridge modern analyses performed through ab-initio methods with the nuclear EDF theory, with the goal of rendering EDF approaches less empirical and reducing uncertainties in their construction. In particular, a new class of EDFs, built on completely microscopic ingredients and benchmarked on ab-initio EFT-based predictions, have recently been formulated and applied to study both nuclear matter and finite nuclei.
The main goal of this contribution is to give an overview of the main features of the new class of EDFs. The possibility of using these EFT-inspired functionals for describing also finite-temperature properties of neutron matter is in particular opening new and promising horizons for computations and modeling in various scenarios of astrophysical interest.