Longitudinal Electrical Conductivity of a Relativistic Gas in an Intense Magnetic Field

The electrical conductivity for an electron gas is computed when a strong quantizing magnetic field is present. This strong field ({}10¹³ G) is thought to exist in the interior of a neutron star. The knowledge of the conductivity is of primary importance for the evaluation of the decay time of the magnetic field due to Ohmic dissipation. This is a critical quantity in most of the recent developments of pulsars as magnetized neutron stars. The chief scattering process is Coulomb scattering by ions. For magnetic field of the order of 10¹³ G, the conductivity is higher by a factor 10-10² with respect to the case without a magnetic field. The ion-ion correlation is included through the use of the static pair-correlation function. Its effect is that of increasing the conductivity by a factor of 2.