A Relativistic Mean Field Model for Entrainment in General Relativistic Superfluid Neutron Stars

TL;DR

This paper develops a fully relativistic mean field model to describe entrainment effects between superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons in neutron stars, accounting for complex relativistic motions within dense stellar cores.

Contribution

It introduces a novel relativistic formalism for superfluid entrainment in neutron stars using a sigma-omega mean field approach, incorporating high-density relativistic effects.

Findings

Model captures independent superfluid flows and entrainment effects.

Application to slowly rotating neutron stars with differential superfluid rotation.

Highlights the importance of relativistic effects at supranuclear densities.

Abstract

General relativistic superfluid neutron stars have a significantly more intricate dynamics than their ordinary fluid counterparts. Superfluidity allows different superfluid (and superconducting) species of particles to have independent fluid flows, a consequence of which is that the fluid equations of motion contain as many fluid element velocities as superfluid species. Whenever the particles of one superfluid interact with those of another, the momentum of each superfluid will be a linear combination of both superfluid velocities. This leads to the so-called entrainment effect whereby the motion of one superfluid will induce a momentum in the other superfluid. We have constructed a fully relativistic model for entrainment between superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons using a relativistic $\sigma - \omega$ mean field model for the nucleons and their interactions. In this context there are two notions of ``relativistic'': relativistic motion of the individual nucleons with respect to a local region of the star (i.e. a fluid element containing, say, an Avogadro's number of particles), and the motion of fluid elements with respect to the rest of the star. While it is the case that the fluid elements will typically maintain average speeds at a fraction of that of light, the supranuclear densities in the core of a neutron star can make the nucleons themselves have quite high average speeds within each fluid element. The formalism is applied to the problem of slowly-rotating superfluid neutron star configurations, a distinguishing characteristic being that the neutrons can rotate at a rate different from that of the protons.