Bulk viscosity from Urca processes: $npe\mu$ matter in the neutrino-trapped regime

TL;DR

This paper extends the study of bulk viscosity in dense nuclear matter to include muonic and leptonic Urca processes, analyzing their rates, temperature dependence, and implications for neutron star phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces muonic Urca processes into bulk viscosity calculations and examines their effects across different matter regimes and temperature ranges.

Findings

Urca process rates are higher than leptonic processes, justifying frozen leptonic reactions.

Bulk viscosity scales as T^{-2} at moderate temperatures.

Sharp drops in bulk viscosity occur near density-independent proton fractions and regime transitions.

Abstract

In this work, we extend our previous study of the bulk viscosity of hot and dense $npe$ matter induced by the Urca processes in the neutrino trapped regime to $npe\mu$ matter by adding the muonic Urca processes as well as the purely leptonic electroweak processes involving electron-muon transition. The nuclear matter is modeled in a relativistic density functional approach with two different parametrizations which predict neutrino dominated matter (DDME2 model) and antineutrino dominated matter (NL3 model) at temperatures for which neutrinos/antineutrinos are trapped. In the case of neutrino-dominated matter, the main equilibration mechanism is lepton capture, whereas in the case of antineutrino-dominated matter this is due to neutron decay. We find that the equilibration rates of Urca processes are higher than that of the pure leptonic processes, which implies that the Urca-process-driven bulk viscosity can be computed with the leptonic reactions assumed to be frozen. We find that the bulk viscosity decreases with temperature as $\zeta\sim T^{-2}$ at moderate temperatures. At high temperatures this scaling breaks down by sharp drops of the bulk viscosity close to the temperature where the proton fraction is density-independent and the matter becomes scale-invariant. This occurs also when the matter undergoes a transition from the antineutrino-dominated regime to the neutrino-dominated regime where the bulk viscosity attains a local maximum. We also estimate the bulk viscous dissipation timescales and find that these are in the range $\gtrsim$ 1 s for temperatures above the neutrino trapping temperature. These timescales would be relevant only for long-lived objects formed in binary neutron star mergers and hot proto-neutron stars formed in core-collapse supernovas.