Submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Where are the r-modes of isentropic stars?

Where are the r-modes of isentropic stars? ABSTRACT Almost none of the r-modes ordinarily found in rotating stars exist, if the star and its perturbations obey the same one-parameter equation of state; and rotating relativistic stars with one-parameter equations of state have no pure r-modes at all, no modes whose limit, for a star with zero angular velocity, is a perturbation with axial parity. Similarly (as we show here) rotating stars of this kind have no pure g-modes, no modes whose spherical limit is a perturbation with polar parity and vanishing perturbed pressure and density. Where have these modes gone? In spherical stars of this kind, r-modes and g-modes form a degenerate zero-frequency subspace. We find that rotation splits the degeneracy to zeroth order in the star's angular velocity Ω, and the resulting modes are generically hybrids, whose limit as Ω → 0 is a stationary current with axial and polar parts. Because each mode has definite parity, its axial and polar parts have alternating values of l. We show that each mode belongs to one of two classes, axial-led or polar-led, depending on whether the spherical harmonic with lowest value of l that contributes to its velocity field is axial or polar. We numerically compute these modes for slowly rotating polytropes and for Maclaurin spheroids, using a straightforward method that appears to be novel and robust. Timescales for the gravitational-wave driven instability and for viscous damping are computed using assumptions appropriate to neutron stars. The instability to nonaxisymmetric modes is, as expected, dominated by the l = m r-modes with simplest radial dependence, the only modes which retain their axial character in isentropic models; for relativistic isentropic stars, these l = m modes must also be replaced by hybrids of the kind considered here.