0000000000403506
AUTHOR
Sanjay Reddy
Effects of Strong and Electromagnetic Correlations on Neutrino Interactions in Dense Matter
An extensive study of the effects of correlations on both charged and neutral current weak interaction rates in dense matter is performed. Both strong and electromagnetic correlations are considered.The propagation of particle-hole interactions in the medium plays an important role in determining the neutrino mean free paths. The effects due to Pauli-Blocking and density, spin, and isospin correlations in the medium significantly reduce the neutrino cross sections. Due to the lack of experimental information at high density, these correlations are necessarily model dependent. For example, spin correlations in nonrelativistic models are found to lead to larger suppressions of neutrino cross …
Kaon condensation in proto-neutron star matter
We study the equation of state (EOS) of kaon-condensed matter including the effects of temperature and trapped neutrinos. It is found that the order of the phase transition to a kaon-condensed phase, and whether or not Gibbs' rules for phase equilibrium can be satisfied in the case of a first order transition, depend sensitively on the choice of the kaon-nucleon interaction. The main effect of finite temperature, for any value of the lepton fraction, is to mute the effects of a first order transition, so that the thermodynamics becomes similar to that of a second order transition. Above a critical temperature, found to be at least 30--60 MeV depending upon the interaction, the first order t…
The Large Observatory For x-ray Timing
The Large Observatory For x-ray Timing (LOFT) was studied within ESA M3 Cosmic Vision framework and participated in the final down-selection for a launch slot in 2022-2024. Thanks to the unprecedented combination of effective area and spectral resolution of its main instrument, LOFT will study the behaviour of matter under extreme conditions, such as the strong gravitational field in the innermost regions of accretion flows close to black holes and neutron stars, and the supra-nuclear densities in the interior of neutron stars. The science payload is based on a Large Area Detector (LAD, 10 m 2 effective area, 2-30 keV, 240 eV spectral resolution, 1 deg collimated field of view) and a WideFi…