rjanish
commented
7 years ago PR has made a lot of progress on this. It looks like at low energies phonon production by coulomb scatters off ions will be the dominant way to interact with ions. Still need more checks however to verify that we've got the right stopping power.
Another important point that PR made: we should verify that these stars really are crystalline and not liquid, as that gives a separate stopping power.
vijayoct27
For electrons with E<GeV, kinematics demands that any energy transfered to an ion be less than the lattice energy. For higher-energy electrons, we cut off the scattering for \delta E < E_L, but to understand thermalization we need to compute this cross-section.
Attempted to get this by assuming an electron scattering softly from a stationary ion, calculate the momentum transfer and put this momentum into phonons. The energy of these phonons is the transfered energy, which gives a relation between b and \Delta E and thus a cross-section. This gives puzzling but not crazy results, with the stopping power increasing by two orders of magnitude to a constant value for E < GeV. Need to do this more carefully (somehow).