Nuclear processes at neutron star surfaces

It is the main purpose of this review to summarize the basic physics that govern the nuclear processing of matter at the neutron star surface. Specifically, we focus our attention on the conditions for which the accretion of matter is explosive and discuss the various nuclear burning regimes in detail. In the next section the authors briefly summarize the observational facts and describe the nature of the x-ray and gamma-ray burst sources. In Section 3, they turn to a discussion of the physics and the basic character of the nuclear burning development. The results of the model calculations are briefly reviewed in Section 4 and compared with the observational data in Section 5. Finally, they make some concluding remarks and point to future developments in the last section