A new statistical method for the structure of the inner crust of neutron stars. (11th August 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Pastore, A; Shelley, M; Baroni, S; Diget, C A
• Is Part Of: Journal of physics. Volume 44:Number 9(2017:Sep.)
• Publication Date: 2017-08-11
• Subjects: neutron stars -- Gaussian process emulator -- Hartree–Fock–Bogoliubov -- inner crust; Nuclear physics -- Periodicals; Particles (Nuclear physics) -- Periodicals; Physique nucléaire -- Périodiques; Particules (Physique nucléaire) -- Périodiques; Kernfysica; Elementaire deeltjes; 539.7
• DOI: 10.1088/1361-6471/aa8207
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0954-3899

Abstract

Abstract: We investigated the structure of the low density regions of the inner crust of neutron stars using the Hartree–Fock–Bogoliubov (HFB) model to predict the proton content Z of the nuclear clusters and, together with the lattice spacing, the proton content of the crust as a function of the total baryonic density ρ b . The exploration of the energy surface in the ( Z, ρ b ) configuration space and the search for the local minima require thousands of calculations. Each of them implies a HFB calculation in a box with a large number of particles, thus making the whole process very demanding. In this work, we apply a statistical model called Gaussian process emulator that makes the exploration of the energy surface ten times faster. We also present a novel treatment of the HFB equations that leads to an uncertainty on the total energy of ≈ 4 keV per particle. Such a high precision is necessary to distinguish neighbour configurations around the energy minima.