General Relativistic Augmentation of Neutrino Pair Annihilation Energy Deposition Near Neutron Stars

General relativistic calculations are made of neutrino-antineutrino annihilation into electron-positron pairs near the surface of a neutron star. It is found that the efficiency of this process is enhanced over the Newtonian values up to a factor of more than 4 in the regime applicable to Type II supernovae and by up to a factor of 30 for collapsing neutron stars.