The Ocean-Crust Boundary of Accreting Neutron Stars

by Zachary Medin (McGill University)

Tuesday 15 Sept 2009, 11:35 → 11:55 Europe/Stockholm

132:028

The ocean of an accreting neutron star has a large impurity, due to the rp-process and subsequent electron capture and light element reactions that happen there. This leads to interesting behavior of the ocean-crust phase transition, such as the solidification of heavy elements to form a relatively pure crust and an enrichment of light elements in the ocean. Numerical simulations using molecular dynamics can accurately model the behavior of the ocean-crust phase transition, but they are not the only way. Here I review a semi-analytic model of the phase transition, based on fitting formulae from numerical simulations of simpler systems such as the core of a white dwarf. The semi-analytic model reproduces the results of numerical simulations for the accreting neutron star system with good accuracy.