Isospin asymmetry and type-I superconductivity in neutron star matter

Mark Alford; Gerald Good; Sanjay Reddy

doi:10.1103/PhysRevC.72.055801

← Back to search

Isospin asymmetry and type-I superconductivity in neutron star matter

Mark Alford, Gerald Good, Sanjay Reddy

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevC.72.055801 · Physical Review C

T1

Active bibliographic source — not scientific approval

Bibliographic access preserves source history; it does not approve extracted materials or validate reported claims. Review warnings on each occurrence separately.

Abstract

It has been argued by Buckley et al. [1] that nuclear matter is a type-I rather than a type-II superconductor. The suggested mechanism is a strong interaction between neutron and proton Cooper pairs, which arises from an assumed U(2) symmetry of the effective potential, which is supposed to originate in isospin symmetry of the underlying nuclear interactions. To test this claim, we perform an explicit mean-field calculation of the effective potential of the Cooper pairs in a model with a simple four-point pairing interaction. In the neutron star context, matter is very neutron rich with less than 10% protons, so there is no neutron-proton pairing. We find that under these conditions our model shows no interaction between proton Cooper pairs and neutron Cooper pairs at the mean-field level. We estimate the leading contribution beyond mean field and find that it is small and attractive at weak coupling.