Neutrino propagation in the neutron star with uncertainties from nuclear, hadron, and particle physics

TL;DR

This study models neutrino interactions within neutron stars, analyzing how nuclear and particle physics uncertainties affect neutrino scattering and mean free paths, which are crucial for understanding neutron star cooling.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of neutrino-nucleon scattering in neutron star matter using various energy-density functionals and form factors, highlighting the impact of density-dependent effects.

Findings

Density-dependent nucleon form factors reduce scattering cross-section.

Neutrino charge radius significantly increases scattering cross-section.

Neutron effective mass influences neutrino interactions at high densities.

Abstract

In the present work, we investigate the neutral-current neutrino-nucleon scattering in the nuclear medium using various energy-density functional (EDF) models such as the KIDS (Korea-IBS-Daegu-SKKU) and SLy4, together with the quark-meson coupling (QMC) model for the nucleon form factors at finite density. The differential cross section (DCS) and neutrino mean free path (NMFP) are computed numerically, considering the density-dependent nucleon form factors (DDFF) and neutrino structural properties such as the neutrino magnetic moment (NMM) and its electric charge radius (NCR). It turns out that the DDFF decreases the scattering cross-section, while the NCR increases it considerably. The effect of the NMM turns out to be almost negligible. We also observe that the value of the neutron effective mass is of importance in the neutron-star cooling process, indicating that for the neutron effective mass larger than the mass in free space, the neutrino can interact with matter at densities $\rho \gtrsim 1.5 \rho_0$ in the neutron star with radius 13 km.