No Arabic abstract
We study the damping of the gravitational radiation-driven f-mode instability in rotating neutron stars by nonlinear bulk viscosity in the so-called supra-thermal regime. In this regime the dissipative action of bulk viscosity is known to be enhanced as a result of nonlinear contributions with respect to the oscillation amplitude. Our analysis of the f-mode instability is based on a time-domain code that evolves linear perturbations of rapidly rotating polytropic neutron star models. The extracted mode frequency and eigenfunctions are subsequently used in standard energy integrals for the gravitational wave growth and viscous damping. We find that nonlinear bulk viscosity has a moderate impact on the size of the f-mode instability window, becoming an important factor and saturating the modes growth at a relatively large oscillation amplitude. We show similarly that nonlinear bulk viscosity leads to a rather high saturation amplitude even for the r-mode instability. In addition, we show that the action of bulk viscosity can be significantly mitigated by the presence of superfluidity in neutron star matter. Apart from revising the f-modes instability window we provide results on the modes gravitational wave detectability. Considering an f-mode-unstable neutron star located in the Virgo cluster and assuming a mode amplitude at the level allowed by bulk viscosity, we find that the emitted gravitational wave signal could be detectable by advanced ground-based detectors such as Advanced LIGO/Virgo and the Einstein Telescope.
We study how the frequencies and damping times of oscillations of a newly born, hot proto-neutron star depend on the physical quantities which characterize the star quasi-stationary evolution which follows the bounce. Stellar configurations are modeled using a microscopic equation of state obtained within the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock, nuclear many-body approach, extended to the finite-temperature regime. We discuss the mode frequency behaviour as function of the lepton composition, and of the entropy gradients which prevail in the interior of the star. We find that, in the very early stages, gravitational wave emission efficiently competes with neutrino processes in dissipating the star mechanical energy residual of the gravitational collapse.
We study the dynamical evolution of a large amplitude r-mode by numerical simulations. R-modes in neutron stars are unstable growing modes, driven by gravitational radiation reaction. In these simulations, r-modes of amplitude unity or above are destroyed by a catastrophic decay: A large amplitude r-mode gradually leaks energy into other fluid modes, which in turn act nonlinearly with the r-mode, leading to the onset of the rapid decay. As a result the r-mode suddenly breaks down into a differentially rotating configuration. The catastrophic decay does not appear to be related to shock waves at the stars surface. The limit it imposes on the r-mode amplitude is significantly smaller than that suggested by previous fully nonlinear numerical simulations.
We recently described an instability due to the nonlinear coupling of p-modes to g-modes and, as an application, we studied the stability of the tide in coalescing binary neutron stars. Although we found that the tide is p-g unstable early in the inspiral and rapidly drives modes to large energies, our analysis only accounted for three-mode interactions. Venumadhav, Zimmerman, and Hirata showed that four-mode interactions must also be accounted for as they enter into the analysis at the same order. They found a near-exact cancellation between three- and four-mode interactions and concluded that while the tide in binary neutron stars can be p-g unstable, the growth rates are not fast enough to impact the gravitational wave signal. Their analysis assumes that the linear tide is incompressible, which is true of the static linear tide (the m=0 harmonic) but not the non-static linear tide (m=+/- 2). Here we account for the compressibility of the non-static linear tide and find that the three- and four-mode interactions no longer cancel. As a result, we find that the instability can rapidly drive modes to significant energies (there is time for several dozen e-foldings of growth before the binary merges). We also show that linear damping interferes with the cancellation and may further enhance the p-g growth rates. The early onset of the instability (at gravitational wave frequencies near 50 Hz), the rapid growth rates, and the large number of unstable modes (> 10^3), suggest that the instability could impact the phase evolution of gravitational waves from binary neutron stars. Assessing its impact will require an understanding of how the instability saturates and is left to future work.
We revisit the possibility and detectability of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) produced by a cosmological population of newborn neutron stars (NSs) with r-mode instabilities. We show that the resultant SGWB is insensitive to the choice of CSFR models, but depends strongly on the evolving behavior of CSFR at low redshifts. Our results show that the dimensionless energy density $Omega_{rm{GW}}$ could have a peak amplitude of $simeq (1-3.5) times10^{-8}$ in the frequency range $(200-1000)$~Hz. However, such a high mode amplitude is unrealistic as it is known that the maximum value is much smaller and at most $10^{-2}$. A realistic estimate of $Omega_{rm{GW}}$ should be at least 4 orders of magnitude lower ($sim 10^{-12}$), which leads to a pessimistic outlook for the detection of r-mode background. We consider different pairs of terrestrial interferometers (IFOs) and compare two approaches to combine multiple IFOs in order to evaluate the detectability of this GW background. Constraints on the total emitted GW energy associated with this mechanism to produce a detectable stochastic background are $sim 10^{-3} M_{odot} c^2$ for two co-located advanced LIGO detectors, and $2 times 10^{-5} M_{odot} c^2$ for two Einstein Telescopes. These constraints may also be applicable to alternative GW emission mechanisms related to oscillations or instabilities in NSs depending on the frequency band where most GWs are emitted.
We model the nonlinear saturation of the r-mode instability via three-mode couplings and the effects of the instability on the spin evolution of young neutron stars. We include one mode triplet consisting of the r-mode and two near resonant inertial modes that couple to it. We find that the spectrum of evolutions is more diverse than previously thought. The evolution of the star is dynamic and initially dominated by fast neutrino cooling. Nonlinear effects become important when the r-mode amplitude grows above its first parametric instability threshold. The balance between neutrino cooling and viscous heating plays an important role in the evolution. Depending on the initial r-mode amplitude, and on the strength of the viscosity and of the cooling this balance can occur at different temperatures. If thermal equilibrium occurs on the r-mode stability curve, where gravitational driving equals viscous damping, the evolution may be adequately described by a one-mode model. Otherwise, nonlinear effects are important and lead to various more complicated scenarios. Once thermal balance occurs, the star spins-down oscillating between thermal equilibrium states until the instability is no longer active. For lower viscosity we observe runaway behavior in which the r-mode amplitude passes several parametric instability thresholds. In this case more modes need to be included to model the evolution accurately. In the most optimistic case, we find that gravitational radiation from the r-mode instability in a very young, fast spinning neutron star within about 1 Mpc of Earth may be detectable by advanced LIGO for years, and perhaps decades, after formation. Details regarding the amplitude and duration of the emission depend on the internal dissipation of the modes of the star, which would be probed by such detections.