Relativistic Superfluids in Curved Spacetime

TL;DR

This paper investigates how spacetime curvature influences relativistic superfluids within compact stellar cores, revealing significant gravitational effects on superfluid properties even in weak gravity, and deriving analytical corrections for different pairing mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of gravitational effects on relativistic superfluids, including numerical and analytical results for scalar and fermionic pairings in curved spacetime.

Findings

Gravity significantly affects superfluidity in compact objects.

Explicit numerical corrections to the superfluid order parameter are derived.

Analytical expressions for gravitational corrections are obtained for different pairing types.

Abstract

Superfluids under an intense gravitational field are typically found in compact stellar cores. Most treatments of these superfluids, however, are done using a flat spacetime background. In this paper, the effect of spacetime curvature on relativistic superfluids is investigated. The scalar-field superfluid in a background metric of a typical star core is considered first. It is found that the superfluid formed inside a compact object can not be of spherical shape. Explicit numerical calculation of the gravitational correction to the superfluid order parameter is performed for two specific examples with different boundary conditions. It is found that even in the weak-gravity limit, gravity can have a significant effect on superfluidity. The relativistic superfluids formed by various fermion pairings are also considered. Two possible cases are considered in the mean-field treatment: antifermion-fermion and fermion-fermion pairings. The effective actions and the self-consistent equations are derived for both cases. An analytical expression for the first-order gravitational correction to the superfluid order parameter is given for the antifermion-fermion pairing; while, the analytical expressions for the matrix elements of the heat kernel operator, which is useful in curved-spacetime QFT calculations, is derived for the fermion-fermion pairing.