Thermal conductivity and impurity scattering in the accreting neutron star crust

Abstract

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 the low energy response of the ions and use it to calculate the electron scattering rate and the electron thermal conductivity. We find that the scattering rate is enhanced by a factor 2-4 compared to earlier calculations based on the simpler electron-impurity scattering formalism. This findings directly impacts the interpretation of thermal relaxation observed in transiently accreting neutron stars and has implications for the composition and nuclear reactions in the crust that occur during accretion.

Revised version addressing referee comments

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• Continued cooling of the accretion-heated neutron star crust in the X-ray transient IGR J17480-2446 located in the globular cluster Terzan 5
• Cooling of neutron stars in soft X-ray transients
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• Structure of Multicomponent Coulomb Crystals
• Constraining the properties of dense neutron star cores: The case of the low-mass X-ray binary HETE J1900.1-2455
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• Impact of Pycnonuclear Fusion Uncertainties on the Cooling of Accreting Neutron Star Crusts
• Constraining Accreted Neutron Star Crust Shallow Heating with the Inferred Depth of Carbon Ignition in X-ray Superbursts
• Electrostatic energy of solid binary ionic mixtures
• Stochastic Dynamics and Bound States of Heavy Impurities in a Fermi Bath
• Nuclear two point correlation functions on a quantum-computer