Magnetic fields in superconducting neutron stars

Abstract

The interior of a neutron star is likely to be predominantly a mixture of superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons. This results in the quantisation of the star's magnetic field into an array of thin fluxtubes, producing a macroscopic force very different from the Lorentz force of normal matter. We show that in an axisymmetric superconducting equilibrium the behaviour of a magnetic field is governed by a single differential equation. Solving this, we present the first self-consistent superconducting neutron star equilibria with poloidal and mixed poloidal-toroidal fields, also giving the first quantitative results for the corresponding magnetically-induced distortions to the star. The poloidal component is dominant in all our configurations. We suggest that the transition from normal to superconducting matter in a young neutron star may cause a large-scale field rearrangement.