2008A&A...480..459H

We calculate heating associated with non-equilibrium nuclear reactions in accreting neutron-star crusts, taking into account the suppression of neutrino losses demonstrated recently by Gupta et al. We consider two initial compositions of the nuclear-burning ashes, A_i=56 and A_i=106. We study the dependence of the integrated crustal heating on uncertainties plaguing pycnonuclear reaction models. We use one-component plasma approximation, with compressible liquid-drop model of Mackie and Baym to describe nuclei. We follow the evolution of a crust shell from 10⁸g/cm3 to 10^13.6g/cm3. The integrated heating in the outer crust agrees nicely with results of self-consistent multicomponent plasma simulations: earlier results fall between our curves obtained for A_i=56 and A_i=106. The total crustal heat per one accreted nucleon ranges between 1.5MeV/nucleon to 1.9MeV/nucleon for A_i=106 and A_i=56, respectively. The value of Q_tot weakly depends on the presence of pycnonuclear reactions at 10¹²-10¹³g/cm3. The remarkable insensitivity of Q_tot to the distribution of nuclear processes in accreted crust is explained.