Viscosity driven instability in rotating relativistic stars

We investigate the viscosity driven instability in rotating relativistic stars by means of an iterative approach. We focus on polytropic rotating equilibrium stars and impose a m=2 perturbation in the lapse. We vary both the stiffness of the equation of state and the compactness of the star to study those effects on the value of the threshold. For a uniformly rotating star, the criterion T/W, where T is the rotational kinetic energy and W is the gravitational binding energy, mainly depends on the compactness of the star and takes values around 0.13–0.16, which differ slightly from that of Newtonian incompressible stars (∼0.14). For differentially rotating stars, the critical value of T/W is found to span the range 0.17-0.25. This is significantly larger than the uniformly rotating case with the same compactness of the star. Finally we discuss a possibility of detecting gravitational waves from viscosity driven instability with ground-based interferometers.