English
 
Help Privacy Policy Disclaimer
  Advanced SearchBrowse

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Released

Journal Article

Twisted-torus configurations with large toroidal magnetic fields in relativistic stars

MPS-Authors
/persons/resource/persons20670

Rezzolla,  Luciano
Astrophysical Relativity, AEI-Golm, MPI for Gravitational Physics, Max Planck Society;

External Resource
No external resources are shared
Fulltext (restricted access)
There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.
Fulltext (public)

1306.2803.pdf
(Preprint), 587KB

MNRAS-2013-Ciolfi-L43-7.pdf
(Any fulltext), 774KB

Supplementary Material (public)
There is no public supplementary material available
Citation

Ciolfi, R., & Rezzolla, L. (2013). Twisted-torus configurations with large toroidal magnetic fields in relativistic stars. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 435, L43-L47. doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slt092.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-002A-FC37-F
Abstract
Understanding the properties of the internal magnetic field of neutron stars remains a theoretical challenge. Over the last years, twisted-torus geometries have been considered both in Newtonian and general-relativistic equilibrium models, as they represent a potentially good description of neutron star interiors. All of these works have found an apparent intrinsic limitation to geometries that are poloidal-field-dominated, with a toroidal-to-poloidal energy ratio inside the star that are <10%, unless surface currents are included and magnetic fields are allowed to be discontinuous. This limitation is in stark contrast with the general expectation that much higher toroidal fields should be present in the stellar interior and casts doubt about the stability and hence realism of these configurations. We here discuss how to overcome this limitation by adopting a new prescription for the azimuthal currents that leads to magnetized equilibria where the toroidal-to-total magnetic-field energy ratio can be as high as 90%, thus including geometries that are toroidal-field-dominated. Moreover, our results show that for a fixed exterior magnetic-field strength, a higher toroidal-field energy implies a much higher total magnetic energy stored in the star, with a potentially strong impact on the expected electromagnetic and gravitational-wave emission from highly magnetized neutron stars.