Effects of quark deconfinement on the maximum mass of neutron stars

We study the consequences of the hadron‐quark phase transition for the values of the maximum mass of neutron stars (NS’s). For the hadronic phase, we use an equation of state (EOS) derived within the Brueckner‐Bethe‐Goldstone formalism with realistic two‐body and three‐body forces. For quark matter we employ the MIT bag model with a density dependent bag parameter. We calculate the structure of NS interiors with the EOS comprising both phases, and we find that the NS’s maximum masses fall in a relatively narrow interval, 1.4 M⊙ ⩽ Mmax ⩽ 1.7 M⊙, the precise value being only weakly correlated with the value of the energy density at the assumed transition point in nearly symmetric nuclear matter.