Rotochemical heating of neutron stars in 2D

Abstract

The matter inside a spinning-down neutron star (NS) undergoes a slow compression that may drive it out of chemical equilibrium and, consequently, trigger non-equilibrium nuclear reactions that can heat up the star. This phenomenon is called rotochemical heating, and it is relatively well-investigated in the literature. Historically, it has been studied almost exclusively via 1D spherically symmetric models. However, rapidly rotating NSs are not spherically symmetric. We present pioneering simulations of rotochemical heating in full General Relativity in 2D axially symmetric models without relying on the slow rotation approximation. We explicitly follow thermal, mechanical, and chemical evolution of rotating NSs as they spin down taking into account both radial and angular distributions of temperature, composition, and mechanical structure. The simplest model is employed: only nucleonic composition, only the non-equilibrium modified Urca process as the main heating/cooling mechanism, and no superfluidity. We analyze the impact of the magnetic field strength as well as the effects of the heat blanketing envelope, initial rotation frequency, NS mass, and core EOS. Most of our conclusions coincide with the results of previous works on this topic, with one important exception. We have found a strong dependence of the cooling curves during the rotochemical heating phases on the core EOS, whereas in the literature it was regarded as very weak. The most likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the authors of the previous works have not considered EOSs with wide enough range of variation of the symmetry energy as a function of density.