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What is the magnetic field distribution for the equation of state of magnetized neutron stars?
(2017)
In this Letter, we report a realistic calculation of the magnetic field profile for the equation of state inside strongly magnetized neutron stars. Unlike previous estimates, which are widely used in the literature, we find that magnetic fields increase relatively slowly with increasing baryon chemical potential (or baryon density) of magnetized matter. More precisely, the increase is polynomial instead of exponential, as previously assumed. Through the analysis of several different realistic models for the microscopic description of stellar matter (including hadronic, hybrid and quark models) combined with general relativistic solutions endowed with a poloidal magnetic field obtained by solving Einstein–Maxwell's field equations in a self-consistent way, we generate a phenomenological fit for the magnetic field distribution in the stellar polar direction to be used as input in microscopic calculations.
Driven by the loss of energy, isolated rotating neutron stars (pulsars) are gradually slowing down to lower frequencies, which increases the tremendous compression of the matter inside of them. This increase in compression changes both the global properties of rotating neutron stars as well as their hadronic core compositions. Both effects may register themselves observationally in the thermal evolution of such stars, as demonstrated in this Letter. The rotation-driven particle process which we consider here is the direct Urca (DU) process, which is known to become operative in neutron stars if the number of protons in the stellar core exceeds a critical limit of around 11% to 15%. We find that neutron stars spinning down from moderately high rotation rates of a few hundred Hertz may be creating just the right conditions where the DU process becomes operative, leading to an observable effect (enhanced cooling) in the temperature evolution of such neutron stars. As it turns out, the rotation-driven DU process could explain the unusual temperature evolution observed for the neutron star in Cas A, provided the mass of this neutron star lies in the range of 1.5 to 1.9M⊙ and its rotational frequency at birth was between 40 (400 Hz) and 70% (800 Hz) of the Kepler (mass shedding) frequency, respectively.