Spin-orbit coupling and P-wave pairing in neutron matter

The interior of neutron star contains matter in its most extreme form occurring in nature. In 1975, Anderson and Itoh proposed to explain the glitches of pulsar signals, firstly observed in 1969, by pinning and unpinning of vortices in a nuclear superfluid inside the star. Since then, the study of neutron matter, a form of matter made from nucleons and assumed to be inside neutron star, have provided fruitful development of many-body theory.

In this talk, I will introduce our recent work on the linear response of neutron matter. The response function and the corresponding dynamic structure function is derived within random-phase approximation, with central, spin, tensor and spin-orbit channels of the Argonne potential. We can see the spin-orbit channel comes in quadratically as a correction to other channels of the response function, which has little effect to the linear response of the system. It becomes important in the neutron p-wave pairing which happens in high density. We will, for the first time, demonstrate the importance of short-ranged correlations and medium polarization effects.