Abstract
The neutrino emissivity from the neutron branch of the modified Urca process is calculated. The nuclear correlation effects are taken into account by employing the correlation functions extracted from the lowest-order constrained variational (LOCV) method applied to asymmetric nuclear matter. Two-body nucleon interaction is modeled by a realistic Argonne AV18 potential. In order to get consistency with semiempirical saturation parameters of nuclear matter and the existence of pulsars, we add a phenomenological Urbana UIX three-body potential to the nucleon Hamiltonian and apply a newly formulated version of the LOCV method that allows for three-body nucleon interactions. We find that at fixed temperature neutrino emissivity is a (weakly) decreasing function of density, due to quenching of the contribution from tensor correlations with increasing density. This is in variance with all previous works. We also find that three-body forces allow for the opening of the direct Urca process at nucleon density .
1 More- Received 7 December 2015
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.93.045806
©2016 American Physical Society