ON NEUTRON STARS'CRUST BREAKING AND GRAVITATIONAL WAVES EMISSION

Many different astrophysical events related to pulsars are taught to be due to starquakes, that could be caused by various possible loadings acting on the crust. However, at the present time, there is still a lack of theoretical well based modelling for most of these loadings and, therefore, we have only a very rough knowledge of the physics of neutron stars’ crust response. This PhD work wants to be a first development of a quite realistic calculation of the effects of chosen loadings, being that the forces due to uniform rotation, differential rotation or pinning, on the crust of pulsars. A Newtonian model, already used in Geophysics, has been adapted to the very different physical conditions of neutron stars’ physics and used to describe self-gravitating neutron stars, both in the incompressible and compressible scenario, subjected to different kinds of loadings. In particular, the deformations due to uniform rotation, differential rotation and slack pinning are studied. It is found that the response of the star is very sensitive to the adiabatic index value, while it is weakly influenced by the stellar mass. In all the cases, the strain developed between two glitches is found to be insufficient to break the crust, a result that challenges the standard picture of pulsar glitches based on crustquakes. Finally, attention is focused on accreting neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binaries and millisecond pulsars. The scenario is the following: the star spins up due to the accretion of matter thus building up stress; the mass quadrupole moment associated with crustal failures leads to the emission of gravitational waves which, in turn, spins down the star until equilibrium. The equilibrium frequency calculated is found compatible with observations. It is also argued that these gravitational waves could be potentially detected by the LIGO-Virgo interferometers in the near future.