What the Timing of Millisecond Pulsars Can Teach us about Their Interior

The cores of compact stars reach the highest densities in nature and therefore could consist of novel phases of matter. We demonstrate via a detailed analysis of pulsar evolution that precise pulsar timing data can constrain the star's composition, through unstable global oscillations (r-modes) whose damping is determined by microscopic properties of the interior. If not efficiently damped, these modes emit gravitational waves that quickly spin down a millisecond pulsar. As a first application of this general method, we find that ungapped interacting quark matter is consistent with both the observed radio and x-ray data, whereas for ordinary nuclear matter some additional enhanced damping mechanism is required.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, version to be published in PR

On the Infrared Behavior of Landau Gauge Yang-Mills Theory with a Fundamentally Charged Scalar Field

Recently it has been shown that infrared singularities of Landau gauge QCD can confine static quarks via a linearly rising potential. We show that the same mechanism can also provide a confining interaction between charged scalar fields in the fundamental representation. This confirms that within this scenario static confinement is a universal property of the gauge sector even though it is formally represented in the functional equations of the matter sector. The simplifications compared to the fermionic case make the scalar system an ideal laboratory for a detailed analysis of the confinement mechanism in numerical studies of the functional equations as well as in gauge-fixed lattice simulations.Comment: 8 pages, PDFLaTe

Non-linear viscous saturation of r-modes

Pulsar spin frequencies and their time evolution are an important source of information on compact stars and their internal composition. Oscillations of the star can reduce the rotational energy via the emission of gravitational waves. In particular unstable oscillation modes, like r-modes, are relevant since their amplitude becomes large and can lead to a fast spin-down of young stars if they are saturated by a non-linear saturation mechanism. We present a novel mechanism based on the pronounced large-amplitude enhancement of the bulk viscosity of dense matter. We show that the enhanced damping due to non-linear bulk viscosity can saturate r-modes of neutron stars at amplitudes appropriate for an efficient spin-down.Comment: 3 pages, contribution to the proceedings of the conference "Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum IX", August 30 - September 3, 2010, Madrid; typos correcte

Low Energy Dynamics in Ultradegenerate QCD Matter

We study the low energy behavior of QCD Green functions in the limit that the baryon chemical potential is much larger than the QCD scale parameter $\Lambda_QCD$. We show that there is a systematic low energy expansion in powers of $(\omega/m)^{1/3}$, where $\omega$ is the energy and $m$ is the screening scale. This expansion is valid even if the effective quark-gluon coupling $g$ is not small. The expansion is purely perturbative in the magnetic regime $|\vec{k}| \gg k_0$. If the external momenta and energies satisfy $k_0 \sim |\vec{k}|$, planar, abelian ladder diagrams involving the full quark propagator have to be resummed but the corresponding Dyson-Schwinger equations are closed.Comment: 4 pages, published versio

Impact of r-modes on the cooling of neutron stars

Studying the frequency and temperature evolution of a compact star can give us valuable information about the microscopic properties of the matter inside the star. In this paper we study the effect of dissipative reheating of a neutron star due to r-mode oscillations on its temperature evolution. We find that there is still an impact of an r-mode phase on the temperature long after the star has left the instability region and the r-mode is damped completely. With accurate temperature measurements it may be possible to detect this trace of a previous r-mode phase in observed pulsars.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of QCD@work 2012 International Workshop on QCD Theory and Experimen

Phase conversion dissipation in multicomponent compact stars

We propose a mechanism for the damping of density oscillations in multicomponent compact stars. The mechanism is the periodic conversion between different phases, i.e., the movement of the interface between them, induced by pressure oscillations in the star. The damping grows nonlinearly with the amplitude of the oscillation. We study in detail the case of r-modes in a hybrid star with a sharp interface, and we find that this mechanism is powerful enough to saturate the r-mode at very low saturation amplitude, of order $10^{-10}$, and is therefore likely to be the dominant r-mode saturation mechanism in hybrid stars with a sharp interface.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures. Typos in Eq. (15), Eqs. (64)-(65) and Eqs. (B4)-(B5) correcte