Chiral asteroseismology: seismic oscillations caused by chiral transport in neutron stars and supernovae

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new asteroseismology framework based on chiral magnetic and vortical waves in neutron stars and supernovae, proposing gravitational wave signals as probes of quark matter and magnetic fields.

Contribution

It derives dispersion relations for chiral waves in relativistic matter, estimates their frequencies and gravitational wave amplitudes, and suggests their use as astrophysical probes.

Findings

Chiral magnetic mode can exist in gapless quark matter with strong magnetic fields.

Estimated gravitational wave frequencies are within detectable ranges.

Chiral waves could serve as new probes for quark matter and magnetic fields in neutron stars.

Abstract

We study the novel asteroseismology of the chiral magnetic wave (CMW) of the quark number density in relativistic quark matter inside neutron stars and core-collapse supernovae and the chiral vortical wave (CVW) of the neutrino number density in relativistic neutrino matter at the core of supernovae. We call the oscillation modes for these chiral waves the chiral magnetic mode (CM-mode) and chiral vortical mode (CV-mode), respectively. We derive the dispersion relations of these new modes in the presence of the chirality flipping due to the finite quark mass and diffusion. We then estimate the possible frequencies of these modes and amplitudes of the resulting gravitational waves. In particular, since the CM-mode can exist only in quark matter with nearly gapless quarks (such as the two-flavor color superconductivity) for a sufficiently strong magnetic field, corresponding gravitational waves provide a new possible probe for such quark matter and the magnetic field in neutron stars.