Search

In quantum gravity phenomenology, the effect of the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) on white dwarfs has been given much attention in the literature. However, these studies assume a zero temperature equation of state (EoS), consequently excluding young white dwarfs whose initial temperatures are substantially high. To that cause, this paper calculates the Chandrasekhar EoS and resulting mass-radius relations of finite temperature white dwarfs modified by the quadratic GUP, an approach that extends Heisenberg's uncertainty principle by a quadratic term in momenta. The EoS was first approximated by treating the quadratic GUP parameter as perturbative, causing the EoS to exhibit expected thermal deviations at low pressures, and conflicting behaviors at high pressures, depending on the order of approximation. We then proceeded with a full numerical simulation of the modified EoS, and showed that in general, finite temperatures cause the EoS at low pressures to soften, while the quadratic GUP stiffens the EoS at high pressures. This modified EoS was then applied to the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equations and its classical approximation to obtain the modified mass-radius relations for general relativistic and Newtonian white dwarfs. The relations for both cases were found to exhibit the expected thermal deviations at small masses, where low-mass white dwarfs are shifted to the high-mass regime at large radii, while high-mass white dwarfs acquire larger masses, beyond the Chandrasekhar limit. Additionally, we find that for sufficiently large values of the GUP parameter and temperature, we obtain mass-radius relations that are completely removed from the ideal case, as high-mass deviations due to GUP and low-mass deviations due to temperature are no longer mutually exclusive.

A modification to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is called the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP), which emerged due to the introduction of a minimum measurable length, common among phenomenological approaches to quantum gravity. One approach to GUP is called linear-quadratic GUP (LQGUP) which satisfies both the minimum measurable length and the maximum measurable momentum, resulting to an infinitesimal phase space volume proportional to the first-order momentum $(1 - \alpha p)^{-4} d^3x d^3p$, where $\alpha$ is the still-unestablished GUP parameter. In this study, we explore the mass-radius relations of white dwarfs whose equation of state has been modified by LQGUP, and provide them with radial perturbations to investigate the dynamical instability arising from the oscillations. We find from the mass-radius relations that the main effect of LQGUP is to worsen the gravitational collapse by decreasing the mass of the relatively massive white dwarfs (including their limiting mass, while increasing their limiting radius). This effect gets more prominent with larger values of $\alpha$. We then compare the results with available observational data. To further investigate the impact of the GUP parameter, a dynamical instability analysis of the white dwarf was conducted, and we find that instability sets in for all values of $\alpha$. With increasing $\alpha$, we also find that the central density at which instability occurs decreases, resulting to a lower maximum mass. This is in contrast to quadratic GUP, where instability only sets in below a critical value of the quadratic GUP parameter.