Quasinormal modes of general relativistic superfluid neutron stars

We develop a general formalism to treat, in general relativity, the linear oscillations of a two-fluid star about static (non-rotating) configurations. Such a formalism is intended for neutron stars, whose matter content can be described, as a first approximation, by a two-fluid model: one fluid is the neutron superfluid, which is believed to exist in the core and inner crust of mature neutron stars; the other fluid is a conglomerate of all other constituents (crust nuclei, protons, electrons, etc.). We obtain a system of equations which govern the perturbations both of the metric and of the matter variables, whatever the equation of state for the two fluids. As a first application, we consider the simplified case of two non-interacting fluids, each with a polytropic equation of state. We compute numerically the quasinormal modes (i.e., oscillations with purely outgoing gravitational radiation) of the corresponding system. When the adiabatic indices of the two fluids are different, we observe a splitting for each frequency of the analogous single fluid spectrum. The analysis also substantiates the claim that w modes are largely due to spacetime oscillations.