Cooling of neutron stars with stiff stellar matter

Recent evidence for high masses ($\sim 2~ M_\odot$) pulsars PSR J1614-2230 and PSR J0348-0432 requires neutron star matter to have a stiff equation of state (EoS). The thermal evolution of compact stars (CS) with stiff hadronic EoS necessitates the application of the "nuclear medium cooling" scenario with a selection of appropriate proton gap profiles together with in-medium effects (like pion softening) on cooling mechanisms in order to achieve a satisfactory explanation of all existing observational data for the temperature-age relation of CS. Here we focus on two examples from \cite{Grigorian:2016leu} for a stiff hadronic EoS without (DD2 EoS) and with (DD2vex) excluded volume correction.