Speaker
Description
Dark matter can be captured in a neutron star and deposits its energy into a star. This dark matter heating effect, however, can be observed only if it dominates over other internal heating effects in neutron stars. In this work, as such an internal heating effect, we examine the frictional heating caused by the creep motion of neutron superfluid vortex lines in the neutron star crust. The luminosity of this heating effect is controlled by the strength of the interaction between the vortex lines and nuclei in the crust. We estimated this luminosity in two approaches; (1) the estimation through the temperature observation of old neutron stars and (2) the estimation from the many-body calculation of a high-density nuclear system. We find that both approaches suggest that the vortex creep heating dominates over the DM heating. The vortex-nuclei interaction must be smaller than the estimated values by several orders of magnitude to overturn this domination.