UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Berkowitz, Evan

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    Some Novel Phenomena at High Density
    (2013) Berkowitz, Evan; Bedaque, Paulo; Physics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Astrophysical environments probe matter in ways impossible on Earth. In particular, matter in compact objects are extraordinarily dense. In this thesis we discuss two phenomena that may occur at high density. First, we study toroidal topological solitons called vortons, which can occur in the kaon-condensed color-flavor-locked phase of high-density quark matter, a candidate phase for the core of some neutron stars. We show that vortons have a large radius compared to their thickness if their electrical charge is on the order of 104 times the fundamental charge. We show that shielding of electric fields by electrons dramatically reduces the size of a vorton. Second, we study an unusual phase of degenerate electrons and nonrelativistic Bose-condensed helium nuclei that may exist in helium white dwarfs. We show that this phase supports a previously-unknown gapless mode, known as the half-sound, that radically alters the material's specific heat, and can annihilate into neutrinos. We provide evidence that this neutrino radiation is negligible compared to the star's surface photoemission.