Rotating neutron stars with non-barotropic thermal profile

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for modeling stationary, differentially rotating neutron stars with non-barotropic equations of state, extending previous models and confirming their stability through numerical evolution.

Contribution

It extends the relativistic Euler equation potential formulation to non-barotropic neutron stars and implements this into the XNS code for the first time.

Findings

Successfully constructed non-barotropic neutron star models.

Demonstrated stability of models through dynamical evolution.

Extended the theoretical framework for neutron star modeling.

Abstract

Neutron stars provide an excellent laboratory for physics under the most extreme conditions. Up to now, models of axisymmetric, stationary, differentially rotating neutron stars were constructed under the strong assumption of barotropicity, where a one-to-one relation between all thermodynamic quantities exists. This implies that the specific angular momentum of a matter element depends only on its angular velocity. The physical conditions in the early stages of neutron stars, however, are determined by their violent birth processes, typically a supernova or in some cases the merger of two neutron stars, and detailed numerical models show that the resulting stars are by no means barotropic. Here, we construct models for stationary, differentially rotating, non-barotropic neutron stars, where the equation of state and the specific angular momentum depend on more than one independent variable. We show that the potential formulation of the relativistic Euler equation can be extended to the non-barotropic case, which, to the best of our knowledge, is a new result even for the Newtonian case. We implement the new method into the XNS code and construct equilibrium configurations for non-barotropic equations of state. We scrutinize the resulting configurations by evolving them dynamically with the numerical relativity code BAM, thereby demonstrating that the new method indeed produces stationary, differentially rotating, non-barotropic neutron star configurations.