Surface r Modes and Burst Oscillations of Neutron Stars

Abstract

We study the $r$-modes propagating in steadily mass accreting, nuclear burning, and geometrically thin envelopes on the surface of rotating neutron stars. For the modal analysis, we construct the envelope models which are fully radiaitive or have a convective region. As the angular rotation frequency $\Omega$ is increased, the oscillation frequency $\omega$ of the $r$-modes in the thin envelopes deviates appreciably from the asymptotic frequency $\omega=2m\Omega/l^\prime(l^\prime+1)$ defined in the limit of $\Omega\to 0$, where $\omega$ is the frequency observed in the corotating frame of the star, and $m$ and $l^\prime$ are the indices of the spherical harmonic function $Y_{l^\prime}^m$ representing the angular dependence of the modes. We find that the fundamental $r$-modes in the convective models are destabilized by strong nuclear burning in the convective region. Because of excessive heating by nuclear buring, the corotating-frame oscillation frequency $\omega$ of the $r$-modes in the convective models becomes larger, and hence the inertial-frame oscillation frequency $|\sigma|$ becomes smaller, than those of the corresopnding $r$-modes in the radiative models, where $\sigma=\omega-m\Omega$ is negative for the $r$-modes of positive $m$. We find that the relative frequency change $f=-(\sigma_{conv}-\sigma_{rad})/\sigma_{rad}$ is always positive and becomes less than $\sim$0.01 for the fundamental $r$-modes of $l^\prime>|m|+1$ at $|\sigma_{rad}|/2\pi\sim$300Hz for $m=1$ or at $|\sigma_{rad}|/2\pi\sim$600Hz for $m=2$, where $\sigma_{conv}$ and $\sigma_{rad}$ denote the oscillation frequencies for the convective and the radiative envelope models, respectively.