Neutrino emission from a hot, dense, plane-parallel atmosphere in hydrostatic equilibrium. II - Numerical methods and interaction functions

Abstract

We solved the plane-parallel, semi-infinite, static neutrino atmosphere problem in Paper I. In this paper, we discuss in detail the numerical technique used in Paper I. We also assemble the functions which describe neutrino and antineutrino emission, absorption, and scattering with nucleons, scattering and pair production-annihilation with electrons and positrons, and pair production-annihilation with plasmons. We present these functions in a form suitable for use in the neutrino and antineutrino transport equations. Some of these results have appeared in previous work by other authors, Finally, we give explicit relations for the entropy of a gas of free protons, neutrons, electrons, positrons, photons, neutrinos, and antineutrinos and show how we use them to calculate the convective stability criterion discussed in Paper I.