1997/01/01 by Lars Bildsten, Greg Ushomirsky, G. Ushomirsky +1 · 9 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Accretion (finance) #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Gravitational wave #High-pressure geophysics and materials #History #Instability #LIGO #Law #Mechanics #Millisecond pulsar #Neutron star #Physics #Political science #Pulsar #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph #gr-qc
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/312454
To appear in ApJ Letters (5 pages, 2 figures, uses emulateapj and natbib)
openalex publication_date 1997/01/01 · arxiv created 1999/11/09 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Recent work has raised the exciting possibility that r-modes (Rossby waves) in rotating neutron star cores might be strong gravitational-wave sources. We estimate the effect of a solid crust on their viscous damping rate and show that the dissipation rate in the viscous boundary layer between the oscillating fluid and the nearly static crust is more than 105 times higher than that from the shear throughout the interior. This increases the minimum frequency for the onset of the gravitational r-mode instability to at least 500 Hz when the core temperature is less than 1010 K. It eliminates the conflict between the r-mode instability and the accretion-driven spin-up scenario for millisecond radio pulsars and makes it unlikely that the r-mode instability is active in accreting neutron stars. For newborn neutron stars, the formation of a solid crust shortly after birth affects their gravitational-wave spin-down and hence their detectability by ground-based interferometric gravitational-wave detectors.