Related papers: Deep Crustal Heating in a Multicomponent Accreted …
The possible presence of amorphous and heterogeneous phases in the inner crust of a neutron star is expected to reduce the electrical conductivity of the crust, with potentially important consequences on the magneto-thermal evolution of the…
Understanding the properties of the crust and the core as well as its interface is essential for accurate astrophysical modeling of phenomena such as glitches, X-ray bursts or oscillations in neutron stars. To study the crust-core…
Superbursts from accreting neutron stars probe nuclear reactions at extreme densities ($\rho \approx 10^{9}~g\,cm^{-3}$) and temperatures ($T>10^9~K$). These bursts ($\sim$1000 times more energetic than type I X-ray bursts) are most likely…
We investigate the structure of neutron star crusts, including the crust-core boundary, based on new Skyrme mean field models constrained by the bulk-matter equation of state from chiral effective field theory and the ground-state energies…
Precision mass spectrometry of neutron-rich nuclei is of great relevance for astrophysics. Masses of exotic nuclides impose constraints on models for the nuclear interaction and thus affect the description of the equation of state of…
The composition of the outer 100 m of a neutron star sets the heat flux that flows outwards from the core. For an accreting neutron star in an X-ray transient, the thermal quiescent flux depends sensitively on the amount of hydrogen and…
Superbursts are rare and energetic thermonuclear carbon flashes observed to occur on accreting neutron stars. We create the first multi-zone models of series of superbursts using a stellar evolution code. We self-consistently build up the…
Nonuniform structure of low-density nuclear matter, known as nuclear pasta, is expected to appear not only in the inner crust of neutron stars but also in core-collapse supernova explosions and neutron-star mergers. We perform fully…
The poorly known crustal equation of state plays a critical role in many observational phenomena associated with a neutron star. Using semi-classical Monte Carlo simulations, we explore the possible configurations of the inner edge of the…
In this work we model stationary neutron star envelopes at high accretion rates and describe our new code for such studies. As a first step we put special emphasis on the rp-process which results in the synthesis of heavy elements and study…
Thermal emission of neutron stars in soft X-ray transients (SXTs) in a quiescent state is believed to be powered by the heat deposited in the stellar crust due to nuclear reactions during accretion (deep crustal heating paradigm).…
Nuclear pasta, that is an inhomogeneous distribution of nuclear matter characterised by non-spherical clustered structures, is expected to occur in a narrow spatial region at the bottom of the inner crust of neutron stars, but the width of…
We discuss the effect of compression on Urca shells in the ocean and crust of accreting neutron stars, especially in superbursting sources. We find that Urca shells may be deviated from chemical equilibrium in neutron stars which accrete at…
The current picture of the collapse and explosion of massive stars and the formation of neutron stars is reviewed. According to the favored scenario, however by no means proven and undisputed, neutrinos deposit the energy of the explosion…
We calculate the thermal conductivity of electrons for the strongly correlated multi-component ion plasma expected in the outer layers of neutron star's crust employing a Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) approach. This allows us to isolate…
Merging neutron stars are expected to produce hot, metastable remnants in rapid differential rotation, which subsequently cool and evolve into rigidly rotating neutron stars or collapse to black holes. Studying this metastable phase and its…
The effective chiral model is extended by introducing the contributions from the cross-couplings between isovector and isoscalar mesons. These cross-couplings are found to be instrumental in improving the density content of the nuclear…
We study the quiescent luminosities of accreting neutron stars by a new mechanism as neutrino heating for additional deep crustal heating, where the neutrino heating is produced by charged pions decay from the nuclear collisions on the…
The multifaceted role of the density dependent nuclear symmetry energy in the nuclear astrophysics involving neutron stars is highlighted. Efforts toward a model independent determination of the dense matter equation state through a…
A number of properties of dense matter can be understood semiquantitatively in terms of simple physical arguments. We begin with the outer parts of neutron stars, and consider the density at which pressure ionization occurs, the density at…