Magnetohydrodynamic stability of magnetars in the ultrastrong field regime I: The core

Abstract

We study magnetohydrodynamic stability of neutron star core matter composed of neutrons, protons and leptons threaded by a magnetar-strength magnetic field 10 14 -10 17 G, where quantum electrodynamical effects and Landau quantization of fermions are important. Stability is determined using the Friedman-Schutz formalism for the canonical energy of fluid perturbations, which we calculate for a magnetizable fluid with 𝐻 = 𝐵. Using this and the Euler-Heisenberg-Fermi-Dirac Lagrangian for a strongly magnetized fluid of Landau-quantized charged fermions, we calculate the local stability criteria for a fluid slab as a stand-in for a segment of a neutron star core, accounting for magnetic and composition gradient buoyancy. The slab is threaded by a field orthogonal to the gravitational field, the Cartesian analogy to a toroidal field. We find that, for sufficiently strong fields 𝐵 10 15 G, the magnetized fluid is unstable to a magnetosonic-type instability with growth times of order 10 −3 s. The instability is triggered by sharp changes in the second-order field derivative of the Euler-Heisenberg-Fermi-Dirac Lagrangian which occur where additional Landau levels start being populated. These sharp changes are divergent at zero temperature, but are finite for nonzero temperature, so realistic neutron star core temperatures 5 × 10 7 K< 𝑇 < 5 × 10 8 K are used. We conjecture that this mechanism could promote the formation of magnetic domains as predicted by Blandford & Hernquist (1982) and Suh & Mathews (2010).