Reaction rates and transport in neutron stars

Understanding signals from neutron stars requires knowledge about the transport inside the star. We review the transport properties and the underlying reaction rates of dense hadronic and quark matter in the crust and the core of neutron stars and point out open problems and future directions.Comment: 74 pages; commissioned for the book "Physics and Astrophysics of Neutron Stars", NewCompStar COST Action MP1304; version 3: minor changes, references updated, overview graphic added in the introduction, improvements in Sec IV.A.

Depletion of the nuclear Fermi sea

The short-range and tensor components of the bare nucleon-nucleon interaction induce a sizeable depletion of low momenta in the ground state of a nuclear many-body system. The self-consistent Green's function method within the ladder approximation provides an ____textit{ab-initio} description of correlated nuclear systems that accounts properly for these effects. The momentum distribution predicted by this approach is analyzed in detail, with emphasis on the depletion of the lowest momentum state. The temperature, density, and nucleon asymmetry (isospin) dependence of the depletion of the Fermi sea is clarified. A connection is established between the momentum distribution and the time-ordered components of the self-energy, which allows for an improved interpretation of the results. The dependence on the underlying nucleon-nucleon interaction provides quantitative estimates of the importance of short-range and tensor correlations in nuclear systems

Role of short-range and tensor correlations in nuclei

The present theoretical understanding of the role of short-range correlations in nuclei near stability is reviewed. Two effects are identified in particular: first, the depletion of mean-field single-particle strength that is no longer available to participate in low-lying excitations. Second, the admixture of high-momentum nucleons in the ground state that is implied by the vanishing relative wave functions of pairs in the medium. The role of the tensor force will be further clarified by discussing isospin-polarized matter. It is demonstrated that the depletion of the proton and neutron Fermi seas depends strongly on the nuclear tensor force and appears to be determined by nucleon-nucleon scattering data. The increased role of short-range and tensor correlations for the minority species makes the case for further experimental scrutiny of nuclei with large neutron excess. Appropriate data of single- and two-nucleon knockout experiments are employed to illustrate the role of short-range and tensor correlations

Pairing and Short-Range Correlations in Nuclear Systems

The structure and density dependence of the pairing gap in infinite matter is relevant for astrophysical phenomena and provides a starting point for the discussion of pairing properties in nuclear structure. Short-range correlations can significantly deplete the available single-particle strength around the Fermi surface and thus provide a reduction mechanism of the pairing gap. Here, we study this effect in the singlet and triplet channels of both neutron matter and symmetric nuclear matter. Our calculations use phase-shift equivalent interactions and chiral two-body and three-body interactions as a starting point. We find an unambiguous reduction of the gap in all channels with very small dependence on the NN force in the singlet neutron matter and the triplet nuclear matter channel. In the latter channel, SRC alone provide a 50% reduction of the pairing gap