Decoupling of superfluid and normal modes in pulsating neutron stars

Abstract

We show that equations governing pulsations of superfluid neutron stars can be splitted into two sets of weakly coupled equations, one describing the superfluid modes and another one -- the normal modes. The coupling parameter s is small, |s| ~ 0.01-0.05, for realistic equations of state. Already an approximation s=0 is sufficient to calculate the pulsation spectrum within the accuracy of a few percents. Our results indicate, in particular, that emission of gravitational waves from superfluid pulsation modes is suppressed in comparison to that from normal modes. The proposed approach allows to drastically simplify modeling of pulsations of superfluid neutron stars.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; published version + mistake in Eq.(6) and a few typos are corrected; results unchange