Quark Stars in 4D Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet Gravity with an Interacting Quark Equation of State

Abstract

Abstract The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) from a binary neutron star (BNS) has opened a new window on gravitational wave astronomy. With current sensitivities, detectable signals coming from compact objects like neutron stars turn out to be a crucial ingredient for probing their structure, composition, and evolution. Moreover, astronomical observations on pulsars and their mass–radius relations place important constraints on the dense matter equation of state. In this paper, we consider a homogeneous and unpaired charge-neutral three-flavor interacting quark matter with corrections that account for the moderately heavy strange quark instead of the naive MIT bag model. We perform a detailed analysis of strange quark stars in the context of the recently proposed 4D Einstein–Gauss–Bonnet (EGB) theory of gravity. However, this theory does not have standard 4D equations. Thus, we show that the equivalence of the actions in the regularized 4D EGB theory and in the original one is satisfied for a spherically symmetric spacetime. We pay particular attention to the possible existence of neutron stars of mass compatible with . Our findings suggest that the fourth-order correction parameter (a 4) of the quantum chromodynamic perturbation and coupling constant α of the GB term play an important role in the mass–radius relation as well as the stability of the quark star. Finally, we compare the results with the well-measured limits of pulsars and their mass and radius extracted from the spectra of several X-ray compact sources.