# Presentation: 180496

## Do Old Neutron Stars Shiver to Keep Warm?

- Jeremy S. Heyl
- Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

## LMXBs and LIGO

- Jeremy S. Heyl
- Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

## Outline

- _[What are LMXBS?](slide5.xml)_
- _[What is LIGO?](slide6.xml)_
- _[What are r-modes?](slide10.xml)_
- How do the modes saturate?
- _[How does LMXB spin evolve?](slide18.xml)_
- _[How many and how bright?](slide22.xml)_
- What if the modes grow further?
- _[What are the prospects?](slide26.xml)_

## Outline

- _[What are LMXBS?](slide5.xml)_
- _[What are r-modes?](slide10.xml)_
- _[How do the modes saturate?](slide15.xml)_
- _[How does LMXB spin evolve?](slide18.xml)_
- _[How many and how bright?](slide22.xml)_
- _[What are the prospects?](slide26.xml)_

## What are LMXBs?

- If the supernova of a star in a binary with a low-mass star does not destroy the binary, an LMXB is formed.
- Accretion will spin up the primary to the Kepler frequency of about 1.6 kHz.

- BUT we don’t see neutron stars spinning this fast.

## What is LIGO?

- LIGO is a pair of laser-interferometer gravitational- wave observatories in Livingston LA and Hanford WA.

- It is sensitive to GWs with a frequency ~ 1 kHz.
- It is now operating but not yet at the anticipated noise level.

## The LMXB-LIGO Connection

- Bildsten (1998)
- Sco X-1 would be detected by LIGO if  its spin is limited by the emission of GW.
- Andersson et al. (1999) noted that the r-modes might do the job.
- Also since 1996 or so, the spins of LMXB primaries have been measured, and they range from about 100 Hz to 600 Hz.

## The LMXB-LIGO-GSFC Connection

- The early theoretical work on r-modes in neutron stars was done in part by Tod Strohmayer at GSFC in 1996.
- Tod and collaborators also found oscillations in Type-I bursts in 1996 verifying that LMXBs spin in the LIGO range.

## What are r-modes?

- Kelvin Wave (*r*=0)
- Rossby Wave

## What are r-modes?

- One type of oscillation  mode in a rotating fluid is the Rossby wave (r-mode).
- If the fluid is not viscous, the r-mode is unstable - CFS instability.

- In the rotating frame the mode counter-rotates.  In the inertial frame, it corotates.

## Why are r-modes unstable?

- In the rotating frame the mode counter-rotates.  In the inertial frame, it corotates.
- The presence of an r-mode reduces the angular momentum of the star.
- GW carry angular momentum away, amplifying the r-mode.

## What if the fluid is viscous?

- Unstable
- Region

- Viscosity damps fluid motions.  Its effects are strongest for small wavelengths.
- Even a large scale mode has a large gradient in a boundary layer.
- Intermode coupling

## Simulating the r-modes

- An r-mode in the best case grows over many thousands of rotations which makes the growth difficult to simulate.
- So people artificially increase the driving

- force by a factor of one thousand to see what happens.

- From Joel Tohline’s website

## Spin-up/Spin-down

- The shear viscosity decreases with increasing temperature and viscosity produces heat, so the r-mode amplitude can run away (Levin ‘99, Spruit ‘99).
- How the mode saturates dramatically affects the evolution.

## Mode Saturation

- Typically r-modes grow over many thousands of rotations, so to treat the problem numerically, the driving force must be increased several thousand-fold. The mode grows until the shocks form.
- The conventional wisdom was that GW would drive the mode amplitude to ~ 1.
- Does this make sense from our experience of fluid dynamics?

## Wind and Waves

- The gravitational radiation reaction is  simply a driving force; it drives the r-mode like a breeze or a gale would.
- Small wind, small waves.
- Big wind, big waves.

## Realistic Coupling

- Arras et al. ‘02 argue that how the mode saturates depends on the driving force.
- The energy in the mode at saturation is proportional to the ratio of the growth rate to the spin frequency, so

## Spin-up/Spin-down Redux

- Why does this matter?
- As the peak amplitude decreases, the duration of spin-down goes up (Wu, Matzner & Arras ‘01),  so a particular object is more likely to be spinning down.
- If the spin-down exceeds 1,000 yr, *T*surf  reflects it.

## How bright in GW?

- One can estimate the amplitude of the GW at Earth by equating the decrease in angular momentum of the star to that carried in the waves.
- With a one-year integration, the initial LIGO configuration could reach an amplitude of ~ 10-26.

## What I swept under the rug - 1

- The naïve S/N calculation assumes that I know several things about the source.
- Period, period derivative
- Right ascension, declination
- Orbital period, semi-major axis
- The period should be ~ few ms,
- Orbital Period ~ 1 hour, a ~ 1 light-second

## What I Swept under the Rug - 2.

- The growth of the r-modes due to GW emission may be hampered by
- Superfluidity (Andersson & Comer ‘01)
- Exotic matter (Lindblom & Owen ‘02)
- Formation of a crust (Bildsten & Ushomirsky ‘00, Lindblom, Owen & Ushomirsky ‘00)
- Magnetic fields (Rezzolla, Lamb, Shapiro ‘00)
- This has only fostered the growth of the r-mode literature.

## How many in the Galaxy?

- LMXBs are thought to be the progenitors of millisecond radio pulsars, so the rate of formation of LMXBs equals that of MSRPs.
- This assumes that the LMXB goes around the cycle once during its lifetime.

## More details

## How bright in photons?

- The core temperature reaches 6  108 K and stays this hot for several thousand years.
- It looks like a 21-year-old neutron star; its surface temperature will be ~ 3  106 K.
- In the Galaxy, the flux is ~ 3 mCrab.
- An enhanced LIGO could detect such an object to 7 Mpc.

## What if the modes crash?

- _[If the mode amplitudes do saturate at unity, then the evolution is quite different.](slide14.xml)_
- The spin-down epoch may be as short as a year (one source per 104 MW).
- How far do you need to go to find 104 MW?
- 0.02 MW Mpc-3, 5  105 Mpc3, d ~ 50 Mpc.
- Just in range of initial LIGO, enhanced LIGO could see this type of source to 700 Mpc.

## Prospects

- If the spin-down epoch is longer than ~ 104 years or less than ~ 1 yr, several LMXBs will be visible with the initial LIGO.
- For the long spin-down epoch, the sky would be static, but for the ~ 1 yr duration, new sources would pop up.
- The Galactic sources would be bright in X-rays without signs of accretion and spinning down quickly -- directed search.