Models of crustal heating in accreting neutron stars

By P. Haensel, J. Zdunik. 2007

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aims. We calculate heating associated with non-equilibrium nuclear reactions in accreting neutron-star crusts, taking into account the suppression of neutrino losses demonstrated recently by Gupta et al. We consider two initial compositions of the nuclear-burning ashes, A i = 56 and A i = 106. We study the dependence of the integrated crustal heating on uncertainties plaguing pycnonuclear reaction models. Methods. We use one-component plasma approximation, with compressible liquid-drop model of Mackie and Baym to describe nuclei. We follow the evolution of a crust shell from 10 8  g cm -3 to 10 13.6  g cm -3 . Results. The integrated heating in the outer crust agrees nicely with results of self-consistent multicomponent plasma simulations: earlier results fall between our curves obtained for A i = 56 and A i = 106. The total crustal heat per one accreted nucleon ranges between 1.5 MeV/nucleon to 1.9 MeV/nucleon for A i = 106 and A i = 56, respectively. The value of Q tot weakly depends on the presence of pycnonuclear reactions at 10 12 -10 13  g cm -3 . The remarkable insensitivity of Q tot to the distribution of nuclear processes in accreted crust is explained.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5c681a1c829c50d8d2fbd400efdcedd4ead52ab3

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. José A. Pons
2. D. Page
3. A. Potekhin
4. R. Rutledge
5. S. Guillot
6. N. Webb
7. Mathieu Servillat
8. J. Lattimer

In Geophysics

1. José A. Pons
2. D. Page
3. R. Rutledge
4. A. Potekhin
5. S. Guillot
6. N. Webb
7. Mathieu Servillat

Citations in the corpus

• Neutron Stars—Cooling and Transport (2015, background): “These processes were studied by several authors (see Haensel and Zdunik 1990, 2008, and references therein).”
• MEASUREMENT OF THE RADIUS OF NEUTRON STARS WITH HIGH SIGNAL-TO-NOISE QUIESCENT LOW-MASS X-RAY BINARIES IN GLOBULAR CLUSTERS (2012, background): “In the theory of deep crustal heating (DCH), the matter accreted during an outburst releases ∼ 1.9MeV of energy via pressure-sensitive reactions: electron captures, neutron emissions or pycnonuclear reactions (Sato 1979; Haensel & Zdunik 1990; Gupta et al. 2007; Haensel & Zdunik 2008).”