Neutron reactions in accreting neutron stars: a new pathway to efficient crust heating.

In our calculation of neutron star crust heating we include several key new model features. In earlier work electron capture (EC) only allowed neutron emission from the daughter ground state; here we calculate, in a deformed quasi-random-phase approximation (QRPA) model, EC decay rates to all states in the daughter that are allowed by Gamow-Teller selection rules and energetics. The subsequent branching ratios between the 1n,.