Cold nuclear fusion in metallic hydrogen and normal metals.
The rate of nuclear fusion from tunneling in very dense metallic hydrogen in the core of Jupiter is calculated to be 10{sup {minus}50} per hydrogen-deuterium pair per second. It is estimated that the width of the fusion barrier for deuterium in palladium or a similar metal must be reduced to, of order, 0.1 A for the fusion rate to be 10{sup {minus}25} per deuterium per second. If this scale is achieved, the ratios of various nuclear reaction rates will be very different for cold versus thermonuclear fusion.

title: Equation of state of dense matter from a density dependent relativistic mean field model
abstract: We calculate the equation of state (EOS) of dense matter using a relativistic mean field (RMF) model with a density dependent coupling that is a slightly modified form of the original NL3 interaction. For nonuniform nuclear matter we approximate the unit lattice as a spherical Wigner-Seitz cell, wherein the meson mean fields and nucleon Dirac wave functions are solved fully self-consistently. We also calculate uniform nuclear matter for a wide range of temperatures, densities, and proton fractions, and match them to nonuniform matter as the density decreases. The calculations took over 6000 CPU days in Indiana University's supercomputer clusters. We tabulate the resulting EOS at over 107,000 grid points in the proton fraction range Y{sub P}=0 to 0.56. For the temperature range T=0.16 to 15.8 MeV, we cover the density range n{sub B}=10{sup -4} to 1.6 fm{sup -3}; and for the higher temperature range T=15.8 to 80 MeV, we cover the larger density range n{sub B}=10{sup -8} to 1.6 fm{sup -3}. In the future we plan to study low density, low temperature (T<15.8 MeV), nuclear matter using a Virial expansion, and we will match the low-density and high-density results to generate a complete EOS table for use in astrophysical simulationsmore » of supernova and neutron star mergers.« less

title: Semiclassical quark model of the nuclear matter response
abstract: The longitudinal response function R(q,w) of nuclear matter is calculated in a semiclassical quark model. The model has a many‐body string‐flip potential that confines quarks into hadrons and avoids color van der Waals forces. Molecular dynamics simulations are used to calculate R(q,w) in one space dimension for a variety of momentum transfers q and excitation energies w. The response function decreases with density (compared to a free hadron response) because of quark exchange between hadrons.

title: Breaking strain of neutron star crust and gravitational waves.
abstract: Mountains on rapidly rotating neutron stars efficiently radiate gravitational waves. The maximum possible size of these mountains depends on the breaking strain of the neutron star crust. With multimillion ion molecular dynamics simulations of Coulomb solids representing the crust, we show that the breaking strain of pure single crystals is very large and that impurities, defects, and grain boundaries only modestly reduce the breaking strain to around 0.1. Because of the collective behavior of the ions during failure found in our simulations, the neutron star crust is likely very strong and can support mountains large enough so that their gravitational wave radiation could limit the spin periods of some stars and might be detectable in large-scale interferometers. Furthermore, our microscopic modeling of neutron star crust material can help analyze mechanisms relevant in magnetar giant flares and microflares.

title: Structure of accreted neutron star crust
abstract: Using molecular dynamics simulations, we determine the structure of neutron star crust made of rapid proton capture nucleosynthesis material. We find a regular body-centered cubic lattice, even with the large number of impurities that are present. Low-charge-Z impurities tend to occupy interstitial positions, while high-Z impurities tend to occupy substitutional lattice sites. We find strong attractive correlations between low-Z impurities that could significantly increase the rate of pycnonuclear (density driven) nuclear reactions. The thermal conductivity is significantly reduced by electron impurity scattering. Our results will be used in future work to study the effects of impurities on mechanical properties such as the shear modulus and breaking strain.

title: Role of heavy-meson exchange in pion production near threshold.
abstract: Recent calculations of s-wave pion production have severely underestimated the accurately known pp → pp� 0 total cross section near threshold. In these calculations, only the single-nucleon axial-charge operator is considered. We have calculated, in addition to the one-body term, the two-body contributions to this reaction that arise from the exchange of mesons. We find that the inclusion of the scalar �-meson exchange current (and lesser contributions from other mesons) increases the cross section by about a factor of five, and leads to excellent agreement with the data. The results are neither very sensitive to changes in the distorting potential that generates the NN wave function, nor to different choices for the meson-nucleon form factors. We argue that pp → pp� 0 data provide direct experimental evidence for meson

title: Entropy, area, and black hole pairs.
abstract: We clarify the relation between gravitational entropy and the area of horizons. We first show that the entropy of an extreme Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole is zero, despite the fact that its horizon has nonzero area. Next, we consider the pair creation of extremal and nonextremal black holes. It is shown that the action which governs the rate of this pair creation is directly related to the area of the acceleration horizon and (in the nonextremal case) the area of the black hole event horizon. This provides a simple explanation of the result that the rate of pair creation of nonextreme black holes is enhanced by precisely the black hole entropy. Finally, we discuss black hole annihilation, and argue that Planck scale remnants are not sufficient to preserve unitarity in quantum gravity.

title: Extremal black holes as exact string solutions.
abstract: We show that the leading order solution describing an extremal electrically charged black hole in string theory is, in fact, an exact solution to all orders in [alpha][prime] when interpreted in a Kaluza-Klein fashion. This follows from the observation that it can be obtained via dimensional reduction from a five-dimensional background which is proved to be an exact string solution.

title: Statistical Entropy of Nonextremal Four-Dimensional Black Holes and U-Duality.
abstract: We identify the states in string theory which are responsible for the entropy of near-extremal rotating four-dimensional black holes in {ital N}=8 supergravity. For black holes far from extremality (with no rotation), the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is exactly matched by a mysterious duality invariant extension of the formulas derived for near-extremal black holes states. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society.

title: Breaking cosmic strings without monopoles.
abstract: It is shown that topologically stable cosmic strings can, in fact, appear to end or to break, even in theories without monopoles. This can occur whenever the spatial topology of the universe is nontrivial. For the case of Abelian-Higgs strings, we describe the gauge and scalar field configurations necessary for a string to end on a black hole. We give a lower bound for the rate at which a cosmic string will break via black hole pair production, using an instanton calculation based on the Euclidean C-metric.

title: Strings in strong gravitational fields.
abstract: String propagation in exact plane-wave solutions (with nonzero axion and dilaton fields) is analyzed. In these backgrounds, strings can undergo transitions from one state to another. Selection rules are derived which describe allowed and forbidden transitions of the string. It is shown that singular plane waves result in infinitely excited strings. An example is given of a solution whose singular properties are the opposite of an orbifold: it is geodesically complete, but still singular from the standpoint of string theory. Some implications of these results are discussed.