RESUMO
Glitches, spin-up events in neutron stars, are of prime interest, as they reveal properties of nuclear matter at subnuclear densities. We numerically investigate the glitch mechanism due to vortex unpinning using analogies between neutron stars and dipolar supersolids. We explore the vortex and crystal dynamics during a glitch and its dependence on the supersolid quality, providing a tool to study glitches from different radial depths of a neutron star. Benchmarking our theory against neutron-star observations, our work will open a new avenue for the quantum simulation of stellar objects from Earth.
RESUMO
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 a hypothetical compact quark star made up by color-flavor-locked quark matter at a temperature T < or approximately 0.01 MeV. The dissipation that we consider is due to 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 < or approximately 0.01 MeV, where the mean free path of phonons due to their self-interactions is larger than the radius of the star. We find that r-mode 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.