Thermal relaxation in young neutron stars

By O. Gnedin, D. Yakovlev, A. Potekhin. 2000

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRA C T The internal properties of the neutron star crust can be probed by observing the epoch of thermal relaxation. After the supernova explosion, powerful neutrino emission quickly cools the stellar core, while the crust stays hot. The cooling wave then propagates through the crust, as a result of its finite thermal conductivity. When the cooling wave reaches the surface (age 10‐100 yrU, the effective temperature drops sharply from 250 eV to 30 or 100 eV, depending on the cooling model. The crust relaxation time is sensitive to the (poorly known) microscopic properties of matter of subnuclear density, such as the heat capacity, thermal conductivity, and superfluidity of free neutrons. We calculate the cooling models with the new values of the electron thermal conductivity in the inner crust, based on a realistic treatment of the shapes of atomic nuclei. Superfluid effects may shorten the relaxation time by a factor of 4. The comparison of theoretical cooling curves with observations provides a potentially powerful method of studying the properties of the neutron superfluid and highly unusual atomic nuclei in the inner crust.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c17357648d9ec9b956e2cbeb4daad632a577fd7c

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Citations in the corpus

Neutron Stars—Cooling and Transport (2015, background): “Gnedin et al. (2001) presented fitting formulae for the dependences of the thermal and electrical conductivities on the parameter xnuc = √5/3Rch/ai.”
DIRECT OBSERVATION OF THE COOLING OF THE CASSIOPEIA A NEUTRON STAR (2010, background): “Depending on the properties of the crust, the relaxation time can take ∼ 10− 100 y (Lattimer et al. 1994; Gnedin et al. 2001).”
Updated Electron-Conduction Opacities: The Impact on Low-Mass Stellar Models (2007, background): “…for the contribution of the ei scattering to the conductive opacity (§ 2.3), implemented it in subsequent papers (e.g., Ventura & Potekhin 2001; Gnedin et al. 2001), and created an online database for computing the updated electrical and thermal plasma conductivities.7 This allows one to…”
Analytical representations of unified equations of state of neutron-star matter (2004, methodology): “Previous calculations of neutrino bremsstrahlung (e.g., Kaminker et al. 1999) and electron heat conduction (e.g., Gnedin et al. 2001) in the crust of a neutron star employed nuclear form factors provided by the SC model based on the parametrization (10) withfq(r) = [1− (r/rmax,q)bq]3 (Oyamatsu…”
2D Cooling of Magnetized Neutron Stars (2007, background): “This stage lasts about 10− 102 yr and was studied in detail by Gnedin et al. (2001).”
Unifying the observational diversity of isolated neutron stars via magneto-thermal evolution models. (2013, methodology): “The phonon Umklapp process is modeled by an analytical formula including the exponential reduction of the scattering rate (Gnedin et al. 2001).”