Neutrinos from optically quiet births of neutron stars?

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Abstract

Accretion of matter onto the surface of a white dwarf in a binary system can push it over the Chandrasekhar mass limit and may cause it to collapse into a naked or nearly naked neutron star without detectable optical emission1–3. Such optically quiet neutron star births should be accompanied by neutrino bursts which could be detected with underground neutrino detectors if the collapse took place in our own Galaxy or in very close nearby galaxies4. However, the frequency of such collapses is not known. It has been shown that the neutrino burst from gravitational core collapse produces, through neutrino-antineutrino annihilation outside the neutron star, an enormous burst of electron-positron pairs and gamma rays5,6. Here we show that if the mass surrounding the newly formed neutron star is less than about 3 × 10−4M, the resultant gamma ray burst can be observed out to distances of at least 300 Mpc, and, consequently, that the observed rate of gamma ray bursts7 limits the birthrate of such nearly naked neutron stars to about 1 per 103 years in galaxies similar to ours. Additional limits are set by the observed flux of 0.511 MeV Galactic annihilation radiation8 and by the cosmic ray data. These rates are too small to contribute significantly to the birthrate of pulsars. They also imply that it is very unlikely that a neutrino burst unaccompanied by optical emission will be detected in the near future by underground detectors.

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    Permanent Address: Department of Physics and Space Research Institute, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel

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