Isospin dependence of nucleon ³PF₂ superfluidity in asymmetric nuclear matter

¹  Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences - 730000 Lanzhou, China
²  School of Nuclear Science and Technology, Lanzhou University - 730000 Lanzhou, China
³  Università di Catania - Catania I-95123, Italy, EU

Corresponding author: zuowei@impcas.ac.cn

Received: 7 August 2008
Accepted: 19 September 2008

Abstract

We have investigated the isospin dependence of the neutron and proton ³PF₂ superfluidity in isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter within the framework of the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach and the BCS theory. We show that the ³PF₂ neutron and proton pairing gaps depend sensitively on isospin asymmetry of asymmetric nuclear matter. As the isospin asymmetry increases, the neutron ³PF₂ superfluidity becomes stronger and the peak value of the neutron ³PF₂ pairing gap increases rapidly. The isospin dependence of the proton ³PF₂ superfluidity is shown to be opposite to the neutron one. The proton ³PF₂ superfluidity becomes weaker at a higher asymmetry and it even vanishes at high enough asymmetries. At high asymmetries, the neutron ³PF₂ superfluidity turns out to be much stronger than the proton one, implying that the neutron ³PF₂ superfluidity is dominated in the highly asymmetric dense interior of neutron stars.