Stellar Forensics I: Cooling Curves

The presence of low mass, degenerate secondaries in millisecond pulsar binaries offers the opportunity to determine an age for the binary system independent of the rotational properties of the pulsar. To this end, we present here a detailed calculation of the evolution of a grid of low mass ($<0.5 M_{\odot}$) helium core white dwarfs. We investigate the effects of different Hydrogen layer masses and provide results for well-known optical band-passes. We supplement the OPAL opacity calculations with our own calculations for low effective temperatures ($T_{eff} < 6000 K$) and also provide fitting formulae for the gravity as a function of mass and effective temperature. In paper II we shall apply these results to individual cases.