Title: “Neutron Stars and the Secret Lives of Quarks”

Abstract: The emergence of gravitational wave observatories provides an exquisite opportunity to probe the nuclear equation of state at a few times nuclear saturation density with mergers involving neutron stars. If nucleons possess interactions beyond those prescribed by the Standard Model, then these can modify the equation of state – and thus macroscopic neutron star properties – in a nontrivial way. These new forces also modify a number of hadronic processes, including η and η’ decays, such that they can be probed at, e.g., JLab. In this talk, I will discuss what neutron star observations say about the possibility of quark-coupled new physics and how current and future measurements of rare meson decays can test these new interactions.