Crosstalk

Throughout the conference, I am asking all observational astronomers, "What single most important fact do you want our nuclear theorist colleagues to take away from your talk?". Also, I am asking all nuclear theorists the similar question, what observational astronomers should take away from their talks.

This is the compendium of responses from the first day.

David Kaplan:
To nuclear theorists: Things are a lot more complicated than we thought five or ten years ago, but we are making progress and learning a lot.

Slava Zavlin: X-ray emission from the young pulsar J1357-6429 and similar objects.
To nuclear theorists: Be cautious in interpreting numbers from observations. There are many systematic uncertainties.

Dong Lai: Surfaces of Magnetic Neutron Stars.
To nuclear theorists: There is a lot of interesting physics to be explored regarding the condensed surfaces of neutron stars.

Eric Gotthelf: CCO pulsars as anti-magnetars: Evidence of Neutron stars Weakly Magnetized at Birth.
To nuclear physicists: Emission mechanisms for CCOs, magnetars and INSs are something which we don't understand, and what we need to know, to explain these classes of NSs jointly.

H.-J. Schulze: Pairing Gaps in Neutron Star Matter.
To observational astronomers:
Polarization effects suppress the BCS gaps. This will impact cooling, and observations of glitches.

Achim Schwenk: Superfluidity in neutron stars.
To observational astronomers:
1. There are many developments attempting S-wave pairing.
2. Neutrons may not be superfluid in the core.
3. Nuclear Theory is now trying to do calculations without model dependence, but including systematic uncertainties.
4. I would like to know what observational constraints exist on pairing in superfluid neutrons.

Enrico Vigezzi. Pairing Calculations Beyond Mean Field in the Inner Crust.
To observational astronomers:
1. Listen to the next talk (Barranco).
2. The specific heat in superfluid neutrons can be influenced due to the presence of nuclear clusters, by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
3. Be cautious about the local density approximation.

F. Barranco: Microscopic Calculations of Vortex-Nucleus Interaction.
To observational astronomers:
1. The pinning energy is not negative at > 0.03 fm-3 as previously thought; it is apparently positive.
2. Consequences in terms of glitch properties will be discussed by Bennet Link tomorrow. But, pinning is simply much less likely, only very weakly, and in a much smaller volume. Bennet will argue that pinning is very difficult to ever occur in this scenario. In other words, pinning would have nothing to do with glitches in the crust.

Joe Carlson. Pairing gaps in low-density neutron matter and cold atoms
To observational astronomers:
A question: The laboratory experiments using cold atoms will solve the problem of low density s-wave pairing caps -- is that useful in an astrophysical setting?