Radiative viscosity of neutron stars

Shu-Hua Yang, Xiao-Ping Zheng, Chun-Mei Pi

Published 2009-12-16Version 1

We study non-linear effects of radiative viscosity of $npe$ matter in neutron stars for both direct Urca process and modified Urca process, and find that non-linear effects will decrease the ratio of radiative viscosity to bulk viscosity from 1.5 to 0.5 (for direct Urca process) and 0.375 (for modified Urca process). Which means that for small oscillations of neutron star, the large fraction of oscillation energy is emitted as neutrinos; but for large enough ones, bulk viscous dissipation dominates.