https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202227407013
Is there pasta in neutron stars?
1 Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Université Libre de Bruxelles, CP 226, Boulevard du Triomphe, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium
2 Dépt. de Physique, Université de Montréal, Montréal (Québec), H3C 3J7 Canada
* e-mail: nicolas.chamel@ulb.be
Published online: 22 December 2022
The interior of neutron stars may contain a mantle made of very exotic neutron-proton clusters with unusual shapes such as rods or slabs collectively referred to as “nuclear pastas” coexisting with free nucleons and a charge neutralizing gas of electrons. Adding shell and pairing effects perturbatively and consistently to the fourth-order extended Thomas-Fermi method using the Brussels-Montreal functional BSk24, we find that nuclear pastas are much less abundant than previously thought from liquid-drop models, thus questioning their very existence in neutron stars.
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2022
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