English

Shear viscosity due to phonons in superfluid neutron stars

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2013-05-29 v2 Quantum Gases High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We compute the contribution of phonons to the shear viscosity η\eta in superfluid neutron stars, assuming neutron pairing in a 1S0^1S_0 channel. We use a Boltzmann equation amended by a collision term that takes into account the binary collisions of phonons. We use effective field theory techniques to extract the phonon scattering rates, written as a function of the equation of state (EoS) of the system. Our formulation is rather general, and can be used to extract the shear viscosity due to binary collisions of phonons for other superfluids, such as the cold Fermi gas in the unitarity limit. We find that η1/T5\eta \propto 1/T^5, the proportionality factor depending on the EoS of the system. Our results indicate that the phonon contribution to η\eta cannot be ignored and might have relevant effects in the dynamics of the different oscillation modes of the star.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1110.0669,
  title  = {Shear viscosity due to phonons in superfluid neutron stars},
  author = {Cristina Manuel and Laura Tolos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1110.0669},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

13 pages; a new curve added; to be published in PRD