English

Electroweak interactions in a relativistic Fermi gas

Nuclear Theory 2008-11-26 v2

Abstract

We present a relativistic model for computing the neutrino mean free path in neutron matter. Thereby, neutron matter is described as a non-interacting Fermi gas in beta-equilibrium. We present results for the neutrino mean free path for temperatures from 0 up to 50 MeV and a broad range of neutrino energies. We show that relativistic effects cause a considerable enhancement of neutrino-scattering cross-sections in neutron matter. The influence of the Q2Q^2-dependence in the electroweak form factors and the inclusion of a weak magnetic term in the hadron current is discussed. The weak-magnetic term in the hadron current is at the origin of some selective spin dependence for the nucleons which are subject to neutrino interactions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.nucl-th/0602045,
  title  = {Electroweak interactions in a relativistic Fermi gas},
  author = {K. Vantournhout and N. Jachowicz and J. Ryckebusch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:nucl-th/0602045},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

11 pages, 7 figures, accepted to Phys. Rev. C, minor changes and updates of the figures are made

R2 v1 2026-07-22T18:35:53.849Z