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Hydrodynamical instabilities in the superfluid interior of neutron stars with background flows between the components

Journal Article · · Physical Review D
The interiors of mature neutron stars are expected to host superfluid neutrons that can flow relative to the normal component tracked by electromagnetic emission. Hence, analogously to the hydrodynamic description of terrestrial superfluids like 4He, the system is best described by means of a two-fluid model. In this work, we study wave propagation in the crust and core of a neutron star by conducting a local plane-wave analysis of the two-fluid hydrodynamic equations for a homogeneous macroscopic element of nuclear matter. We explicitly account for a background flow between the two components (as would be expected in the presence of pinning of superfluid vortex lines) and the entrainment coupling, and we consider both standard (Hall-Vinen) and isotropic (Gorter-Mellink) forms of the mutual friction. We find that for standard mutual friction there are families of unstable inertial and sound waves both in the case of a counter-flow along the superfluid vortex axis and for counterflow perpendicular to the vortex axis and find that entrainment leads to a quantitative difference between instabilities in the crust and core of the star. For isotropic mutual friction, we find no unstable branches of the dispersion law and speculate that instabilities in a straight vortex array may be linked to glitching behavior, which then ceases until the turbulence has decayed.
Research Organization:
Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
National Science Centre of Poland (NCN); USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
FG02-00ER41132
OSTI ID:
1799982
Journal Information:
Physical Review D, Journal Name: Physical Review D Journal Issue: 12 Vol. 100; ISSN 2470-0010
Publisher:
American Physical Society (APS)Copyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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