Gravitational waves from color-magnetic `mountains' in neutron stars

Abstract

Neutron stars may harbour the true ground state of matter in the form of strange quark matter. If present, this type of matter is expected to be a color superconductor, a consequence of quark pairing with respect to the color/flavor degrees of freedom. The stellar magnetic field threading the quark core becomes a color-magnetic admixture and, in the event that superconductivity is of type II, leads to the formation of color-magnetic vortices. In this Letter we show that the volume-averaged color-magnetic vortex tension force should naturally lead to a significant degree of non-axisymmetry in systems like radio pulsars. We show that gravitational radiation from such color-magnetic `mountains' in young pulsars like the Crab and Vela could be observable by the future Einstein Telescope, thus becoming a probe of paired quark matter in neutron stars. The detectability threshold can be pushed up toward the sensitivity level of Advanced LIGO if we invoke an interior magnetic field about a factor ten stronger than the surface polar field.

5 pages, 1 eps figure. This version contains additional discussion of the results and will appear in Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (6)

• Color superconductivity in dense quark matter
• Maximum elastic deformations of compact stars with exotic equations of state
• The braking index of PSR J1734-3333 and the magnetar population
• Are neutron stars with crystalline colour superconducting cores interesting for the LIGO experiment?
• Constraining crystalline color superconducting quark matter with gravitational-wave data
• Gravitational radiation from crystalline color-superconducting hybrid stars

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Gravitational Waves from Neutron Stars: A Review
• Vortices and Other Topological Solitons in Dense Quark Matter
• Internal X-ray plateau in short GRBs: Signature of supramassive fast-rotating quark stars?
• The Science of the Einstein Telescope
• Reaction rates and transport in neutron stars
• Magnetic fields in superconducting neutron stars
• Neutron star deformation due to multipolar magnetic fields
• A directed search for gravitational waves from Scorpius X-1 with initial LIGO
• Tilted torus magnetic fields in neutron stars and their gravitational wave signatures
• Critical magnetic fields in a superconductor coupled to a superfluid
• Axisymmetric deformations of neutron stars and gravitational-wave astronomy
• Search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in the first part of the fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observing run
• Stochastic gravitational wave background from newly born massive magnetars: The role of a dense matter equation of state
• New color-magnetic defects in dense quark matter
• Interpreting the AXP 1E 2259+586 antiglitch as a change in internal magnetization
• What can PSR J1640-4631 tell us about the internal physics of this neutron star?
• Measuring neutron-star distances and properties with gravitational-wave parallax
• Gravitational waves from neutron-star mountains
• Geometric Approach to Analytic Marginalisation of the Likelihood Ratio for Continuous Gravitational Wave Searches
• Constraints on the internal physics of neutron stars from the observational data of several young pulsars: the role of a power-law decaying dipole magnetic field
• Constraining the abundance of spinning deformed Galactic compact objects with continuous gravitational waves
• Searching for continuous gravitational waves from highly deformed compact objects with DECIGO
• Multicomponent Superfluids and Superconductors in Dense Nuclear and Quark Matter
• Narrowband searches for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in the first two parts of the fourth LIGO--Virgo--KAGRA observing run
• Gravitational waves from spinning neutron stars as not-quite-standard sirens