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[1] 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 phenomenological nucleon-nucleon interaction. We can see the spin-orbit channel comes in quadratically as a correction to other channels of the response function. 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.