English

Compressional modes in two-superfluid neutron stars with leptonic buoyancy

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2018-10-15 v3

Abstract

We investigate the compressional modes of cold neutron stars with cores consisting of superfluid neutrons, superconducting protons and normal fluid electrons and muons, and crusts that contain superfluid neutrons plus a normal fluid of (spherical) nuclei and electrons. We develop a two-fluid formalism for the core that accounts for leptonic buoyancy, and an analogous treatment for the crust. We adopt the Cowling approximation, neglecting gravitational perturbations, but include all effects of the background space-time. We introduce a phenomenological, easily-modified nuclear equation of state which contains all of the thermodynamic information required to compute the coupled fluid oscillations, with parameters that are constrained by nuclear physics and the requirement that the maximum mass of a neutron star is 2M\geq 2M_{\odot}. Using four parametrizations of this equation of state with nuclear compressibilities K=230K=230-280280 MeV, we calculate the Brunt-V\"{a}is\"{a}l\"{a} frequency due to leptonic buoyancy, and find the corresponding gg-mode frequencies and eigenfunctions. We find that the WKB approximation reproduces gg-mode frequencies closely. We examine the dependence of gg-mode frequencies on stellar mass, nuclear compressibility and strength of neutron-proton entrainment, and compare to previous calculations of gg-mode frequencies due to leptonic buoyancy. We also compute the pp-mode spectra, confirming previous findings that the two fluids behave as if uncoupled except the case of large entrainment, and show the existence of nearly resonant mode pairs which could lead to nonlinear pp-gg instabilities even at zero temperature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.08741,
  title  = {Compressional modes in two-superfluid neutron stars with leptonic buoyancy},
  author = {P. B. Rau and I. Wasserman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.08741},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

19 pages, 12 figures