Reinvestigation of the electron fraction and electron Fermi energy of neutron star

TL;DR

This paper revisits the electron fraction and Fermi energy in neutron stars, introducing simplified linear models and a dimensionless density variable to improve analytical formulas for better understanding of neutron star properties.

Contribution

It presents new analytical formulas for electron fraction and density in neutron stars using linear functions and a dimensionless variable, improving simplicity and realism over previous models.

Findings

Derived analytical formulas for $Y_e$ and $ ho$ in neutron star models.

Reduced fitting coefficients scope with a dimensionless density variable.

Provided numerical errors and deviations for the analytical fits.

Abstract

In this work, we reinvestigate the electron fraction $Y_{e}$ and electron Fermi energy $E_{F}(e)$ of neutron stars, based on our previous work of Li et al.(2016), in which we firstly deduced a special solution to $E_{F}(e)$, and then obtained several useful analytical formulae for $Y_{\rm e}$ and matter density $\rho$ within classical models and the relativistic mean field(RMF) theory using numerically fitting. The advantages of this work include the following aspects:(1) The linear functions are substituted for the nonlinear exponential functions used in the previous work. This method may be more simple, and closer to realistic equation of state\,(EoS) of a neutron star(NS), because there are linear or quasi-linear relationships between number fractions of leptons and matter density, which can be seen by solving NS EoS; (2)we introduce a dimensionless variable $\varrho$\,($\varrho=\rho/\rho_0$, $\rho_{0}$ is the standard saturated nuclear density), which greatly reduces the scope of the fitting coefficients;(3)we present numerical errors including absolute and relative deviations between the data and fit. By numerically simulating, we have obtained several analytical formulae for $Y_{e}$ and $\rho$ for both APR98 and RMF models. Combining these analytical formulae with the special solution, we can calculate the value of $E_{\rm F}(e)$ for any given matter density. Since $Y_e$ and $E_{ F}(e)$ are important in assessing cooling rate of a NS and the possibility of kaon/pion condensation in the NS interior, this study could be useful in the future study on the thermal evolution of a NS.