Neutron star structure with chiral interactions

We use two-body and three-body nuclear interactions derived in the framework of chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) with and without the explicit isobar contributions to calculate the energy per particle of symmetric nuclear matter and pure neutron matter employing the microscopic Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach. In particular, we present nuclear matter calculations using the new fully local in coordinate-space two-nucleon interaction at the next-to-next-to-next-to-leading-order (N3LO) of ChPT with isobar intermediate states (N3LO) recently developed by Piarulli et al. [1]. We compute the β-equilibrium equation of state and determine the neutron star mass-radius and mass-central density sequences. We find that the adopted interactions are able to provide satisfactory properties of nuclear matter at saturation density as well as to fulfill the limit of two-solar mass for the maximum mass configuration as required by recent observations.