Effects of neutron-star superconductivity on magnetic monopoles and core field decay

Abstract

From the magnetic properties of old neutron stars we propose that an observation of a sufficiently old pulsar limits any ‘‘grand unified theory’’ heavy magnetic monopole flux in the pulsar neighborhood to below 5×10−24τ10−2cm− 2sr−1sec−1, where τ10 is the age (in 1010 yr) of the pulsar’s present magnetic field and monopole speeds are ∼10−3 c. For the millisecond pulsar PSR 1937+214 a major improvement over the Parker limit is obtained, which is also better than various limits from monopole catalysis of baryon decay, provided τ10≳10−1. The consideration of monopole dynamics inside superconducting neutron-star cores leads to this conclusion.

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