Andreev-Bashkin effect and knot solitons in an interacting mixture of a charged and a neutral superfluid with possible relevance for neutron stars

Egor Babaev

doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.70.043001

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Andreev-Bashkin effect and knot solitons in an interacting mixture of a charged and a neutral superfluid with possible relevance for neutron stars

Egor Babaev

DOI 10.1103/PhysRevD.70.043001 · Physical Review D

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Abstract

We discuss a mixture of interacting neutral and charged Bose condensates, which is supposed being realized in the interior of neutron stars in the form of a coexistent neutron superfluid and protonic superconductor. We show that in this system, besides ordinary vortices of the S1→S1 map, the neutron condensate also allows for (meta)stable finite-length knotted solitons, which are characterized by a nontrivial Hopf invariant and in some circumstances may be stabilized by a Faddeev-Skyrme term induced by the drag effect. We also consider a helical protonic flux tube in this system and show that, in contrast, it does not induce a Faddeev-Skyrme term.