The Critical Rotation of Strange Stars and Rapidly Rotating Pulsars

Abstract

We utilize the bulk viscosity of interacting strange quark matter to reevaluate the damping time scale. The presence of medium effect of bulk viscosity leads to a stronger damping of r-modes, which can be over an order of magnitude for realistic parameters. We find that the r-mode instability window is narrowed due to the medium effect, and hence when a pulsar reaches the instability window it will only slow down by gravitational wave emission to a period of 1.78msec instead of 2.5msec given by early estimate. As a theoretical upper rotation limit of pulsars, the period of 1.78msec is very close to the two most rapidly spinning pulsars known, with periods of about 1.6msec.

10pages,5figures

References in corpus (3)

• On the dynamics of superfluid neutron star cores
• Strange stars as persistent sources of gravitational waves
• Magnetic effects on the viscous boundary layer damping of the r-modes in neutron stars

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Running coupling constant from lattice data and bulk viscosity of strange quark matter
• Bulk viscosity of strange quark matter in density-dependent quark mass model and dissipation of r-modes in strange stars
• Bulk viscosity of Mixed nucleon-hyperon-quark Matter in Neutron stars
• R-mode instability of strange stars and observations of neutron stars in LMXBs
• Implication of Existence of Hybrid stars and Theoretical Expectation of Submillisecond Pulsars