Papers › Millihertz Quasi-Periodic Oscillations from Marginally Stable Nuclear Burning on an...
Millihertz Quasi-Periodic Oscillations from Marginally Stable Nuclear Burning on an Accreting Neutron Star
Alexander Heger, Andrew Cumming, Stanford E. Woosley
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
We investigate marginally stable nuclear burning on the surface of accreting neutron stars as an explanation for the mHz quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) observed from three low mass X-ray binaries. At the boundary between unstable and stable burning, the temperature dependence of the nuclear heating rate and cooling rate almost cancel. The result is an oscillatory mode of burning, with an oscillation period close to the geometric mean of the thermal and accretion timescales for the burning layer. We describe a simple one-zone model which illustrates this basic physics, and then present detailed multizone hydrodynamical calculations of nuclear burning close to the stability boundary using the KEPLER code. Our models naturally explain the characteristic 2 minute period of the mHz QPOs, and why they are seen only in a very narrow range of X-ray luminosities. The oscillation period is sensitive to the accreted hydrogen fraction and the surface gravity, suggesting a new way to probe these parameters. A major puzzle is that the accretion rate at which the oscillations appear in the theoretical models is an order of magnitude larger than the rate implied by the X-ray luminosity when the mHz QPOs are seen. We discuss the implications for our general understanding of nuclear burning on accreting neutron stars. One possibility is that the accreted material covers only part of the neutron star surface at luminosities Lx > ~1E37 erg/s.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections