Decoding Rotating Neutron Stars: Role of the Symmetry Energy Slope

Abstract

In 2023 December, the Fermi Large Area Telescope Catalog announced the discovery of 33 new millisecond pulsars. Motivated by that, in this work, I study how different values of the symmetry energy slope (L) affect the properties of static and slowly rotating neutron stars. For fixed values of angular velocity, I study how the slope influences the increase of the maximum mass, the radii of the canonical 1.4 M ⊙, its eccentricity, as well the same quantities for the 2.01 M ⊙ stars. I show that different slope values cause different variations not only in the absolute quantities but also in relative ones. Indeed, different slope values predict different values for the eccentricity, which does not depend on the absolute value of the neutron stars’ radii. Therefore, this quantity can be a powerful tool to constrain the symmetry energy slope.