Microscopic calculation of the neutrino mean free path inside hot neutron matter

Abstract

We calculate the neutrino mean free path and the Equation of State of pure neutron matter at finite temperature within a selfconsistent scheme based on the Brueckner--Hartree--Fock approximation. We employ the nucleon-nucleon part of the recent realistic baryon-baryon interaction (model NSC97e) constructed by the Nijmegen group. The temperatures considered range from 10 to 80 MeV. We report on the calculation of the mean field, the residual interaction and the neutrino mean free path including short and long range correlations given by the Brueckner--Hartree--Fock plus Random Phase Approximation (BHF+RPA) framework. This is the first fully consistent calculation in hot neutron matter dedicated to neutrino mean free path. We compare systematically our results to those obtain with the D1P Gogny effective interaction, which is independent of the temperature. The main differences between the present calculation and those with nuclear effective interactions come from the RPA corrections to BHF (a factor of about 8) while the temperature lack of consistency accounts for a factor of about 2.