Mutual friction in a cold color flavor locked superfluid and r-mode instabilities in compact stars

Understand

Dissipative processes acting in rotating neutron stars are essential in preventing the growth of the r-mode instability.

• We estimate the damping time of r-modes of an hypothetical compact quark star made up by color flavor locked quark matter at a temperature $T \lesssim 0.01$ MeV.
• The dissipation that we consider is due to the the mutual friction force between the normal and the superfluid component arising from the elastic scattering of phonons with quantized vortices.
• This process is the dominant one for temperatures $T \lesssim 0.01$ MeV where the mean free path of phonons due to their self-interactions is larger than the radius of the star and they can be described as an ideal bosonic gas.