Exchange of transverse plasmons and electrical conductivity of neutron star cores

摘要

We study the electrical conductivity in magnetized neutron star cores produced by collisions between charged particles. We take into account the ordinary exchange of longitudinal plasmons and the exchange of transverse plasmons in collisions between particles. The exchange of transverse plasmons is important for collisions between relativistic particles, but it has been disregarded previously when calculating the electrical conductivity. We show that taking this exchange into account changes the electrical conductivity, including its temperature dependence (thus, for example, the temperature dependence of the electrical resistivity along the magnetic field in the low-temperature limit takes the form R-parallel to proportional to T-5/3 instead of the standard dependence R-parallel to proportional to T-2 for degenerate Fermi systems). We briefly describe the effect of possible neutron and proton superfluidity in neutron star cores on the electrical conductivity and discuss various scenarios for the evolution of neutron star magnetic fields.