Speaker
Description
Neutron-star observations encode the equation of state of cold, dense matter, but reconstructing it is an ill-posed inverse problem, and standard analyses assume fixed functional forms that restrict and unevenly weight the admissible equations of state. We reconstruct the equation of state with a denoising diffusion model trained on a large synthetic ensemble of sound-speed profiles spanning hadronic, hybrid and quark-matter behaviour. Chiral effective field theory anchors generation at low density through inpainting; perturbative QCD and multimessenger data: NICER radii, the tidal deformability of GW170817 and heavy-pulsar masses, enter afterwards through importance reweighting, keeping the learned prior and the observational likelihood cleanly separated. The posterior favours a soft equation of state and indicates near-conformal matter in the cores of the heaviest stars, while current data remain nearly uninformative about a strong first-order phase transition.