Bulk viscosity for interacting strange quark matter and r-mode instability windows for strange stars *

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the bulk viscosity of strange quark matter in the framework of the equivparticle model, where analytical formulae are obtained for certain temperature ranges, which can be readily applied to those with various quark mass scalings. In the case of adopting a quark mass scaling with both linear confinement and perturbative interactions, the obtained bulk viscosity increases by orders of magnitude compared with those in bag model scenarios. Such an enhancement is mainly due to the large quark equivalent masses adopted in the equivparticle model, which are essentially attributed to the strong interquark interactions and are related to the dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Due to the high bulk viscosity, the predicted damping time of oscillations for a canonical 1.4 strange star is less than one millisecond, which is shorter than previous findings. Consequently, the obtained -mode instability window for the canonical strange stars well accommodates the observational frequencies and temperatures for pulsars in low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs).