Speaker
Description
Over the last decade or so, blazing-fast progress has been made in perturbative computations of dense QCD matter. With the sign problem preventing the use of lattice methods, pQCD is a rare first-principles methods for gaining insight into the properties of quark matter and, consequently, constraining the properties of the neutron star equation of state.
I will outline the current progress of the NNNLO cold dense pressure computation, which incorporates state-of-the-art hard thermal loop calculations as well as novel numerical approaches to compute complex thermal multiloop diagrams in order to evaluate different contributions to the free energy. I will also describe how these computations can be extended beyond the cold dense limit to finite temperatures, as well as quark masses.
Lastly, I will discuss how the high-order perturbative results can be applied as an ingredient in the more dynamic world of neutron star collisions, specifically in the context of viscous hydrodynamics. They appear in the bulk viscous transport coefficients, which also require an understanding of electroweak rates in a dense background, and lead to nontrivial transport equations describing multicomponent fluids.