On Thermohaline Mixing in Accreting White Dwarfs

Abstract

We discuss the recent claim that the thermohaline ("fingering") instability is important in accreting white dwarfs, increasing the derived accretion fluxes potentially by orders of magnitude. We present an alternative view and conclude that at least in the steady state this is not the case and the current method of estimating accretion fluxes is correct.