On the consistency of the spindown behavior of young and old pulsars

TL;DR

This paper investigates how gravitational wave emission via r-modes affects pulsar spin-down, explaining low rotation rates in young pulsars and highlighting discrepancies with old pulsars, proposing potential resolutions.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of r-modes' role in pulsar spindown and discusses conditions under which this mechanism aligns with observational data.

Findings

R-modes can explain low rotation frequencies in young pulsars with large saturation amplitudes.

Old millisecond pulsars would spin down faster than observed if r-modes had large saturation amplitudes.

Possible resolutions are discussed to reconcile the model with observational data.

Abstract

We study the spindown of pulsars due to gravitational wave emission and show that r-modes in neutron stars provide a quantitative explanation for the observed low rotation frequencies of young pulsars if the r-mode saturation amplitude is sufficiently large. In contrast for such large saturation amplitudes old hadronic millisecond pulsars would spin down much faster than observed. We discuss resolutions of this apparent discrepancy that could make this mechanism consistent with the observational data.