Transport properties of the Fermi hard-sphere system

TL;DR

This paper calculates the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity of a Fermi hard-sphere system as a model for neutron star matter, highlighting the importance of quasiparticle effective mass and second order self-energy effects.

Contribution

It introduces a calculation of transport coefficients using correlated basis functions and cluster expansion, emphasizing the impact of effective mass and higher-order effects.

Findings

Transport coefficients are highly sensitive to quasiparticle effective mass.

Second order self-energy contributions significantly influence transport properties.

Results provide insights into neutron star matter behavior.

Abstract

The transport properties of neutron star matter play an important role in many astrophysical processes. We report the results of a calculation of the shear viscosity and thermal conductivity coefficients of the hard-sphere fermion system of degeneracy $\nu$=2, that can be regarded as a model of pure neutron matter. Our approach is based on the effective interaction obtained from the formalism of correlated basis functions and the cluster expansion technique. The resulting transport coefficients show a strong sensitivity to the quasiparticle effective mass, reflecting the effect of second order contributions to the self-energy that are not taken into account in nuclear matter studies available in the literature.