NEUTRINO SELF-ENERGY AND PAIR CREATION IN NEUTRON-STARS

Massless neutrino exchange leads to a new long-range force between mat ter. Recently, it was claimed both that the potential energy due to th is interaction i) dominates the total energy of neutron stars and ii) that it is zero. We recalculate the energy of a neutrino propagating i n a classical, uniform background of neutrons and find a negligible, b ut non-zero contribution to the total energy of neutron stars. We esti mate the neutrino pair creation rate of a neutron star caused by a den sity gradient of the background neutrons but found it too small to be observable. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.