Diffusion as a leading dissipative mechanism in superconducting neutron stars

Abstract

Despite the fact that different particle species can diffuse with respect to each other in neutron star (NS) cores, the effect of particle diffusion on various phenomena associated with NS oscillations is usually ignored. Here we demonstrate that the diffusion can be extremely powerful dissipative mechanism in superconducting NSs. In particular, it can be much more efficient than the shear and bulk viscosities. This result has important implications for the damping times of NS oscillations, development and saturation of dynamical instabilities in NSs, and for the excitation and coupling of oscillation modes during the late inspiral of binary NSs.