Inside neutron stars: from hadrons to quarks

While neutron stars were first posited in the early thirties, and discovered as pulsars in late sixties, it is only recently that we are beginning to understand the matter they contain. In this talk I will describe the ongoing development of a consistent picture of the liquid interiors of neutron stars, driven by three recent advances: observations of heavy neutron stars with masses ~2.0 solar masses; determinations of masses and radii simultaneously for an increasing number of neutron stars; and an emerging understanding in QCD of how nuclear matter [1] can turn into deconfined quark matter in the interior. [1] T. Kojo, P. D. Powell, Y. Song, and G. Baym, Phenomenological QCD equation of state for massive neutron stars, Phys. Rev. D 91, 045003:1-15 (2015). Pre-colloquium for students at 15:30