Mutual friction in a cold color flavor locked superfluid and r-mode instabilities in compact stars

Abstract

Dissipative processes acting in rotating neutron stars are essential in preventing the growth of the r-mode instability. We estimate the damping time of r-modes of an hypothetical compact quark star made up by color flavor locked quark matter at a temperature $T\lesssim 0.01$ MeV. The dissipation that we consider is due to the the mutual friction force between the normal and the superfluid component arising from the elastic scattering of phonons with quantized vortices. This process is the dominant one for temperatures $T\lesssim 0.01$ MeV where the mean free path of phonons due to their self-interactions is larger than the radius of the star and they can be described as an ideal bosonic gas. We find that r-modes oscillations are efficiently damped by this mechanism for pulsars rotating at frequencies of the order of 1 Hz at most. Our analysis rules out the possibility that cold pulsars rotating at higher frequencies are entirely made up by color flavor locked quark matter.

4 pages; comments and refs. added; it matches with published version

References in corpus (7)

• Color superconductivity in dense quark matter
• The ATNF Pulsar Catalogue
• The rigidity of crystalline color superconducting quark matter
• Bulk viscosity due to kaons in color-flavor-locked quark matter
• Bulk viscosity in a cold CFL superfluid
• Bulk viscosity in kaon-condensed color-flavor locked quark matter
• Transport theory for cold relativistic superfluids from an analogue model of gravity

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Quark-Novae, cosmic reionization, and early r-process element production
• Hydrodynamics of the CFL superfluid