Nuclear pasta phases in the neutron stars mantle can affect the mechanical and transport properties of superdense matter, thus playing an important role in the dynamics and evolution of neutron ...stars. In this paper, we compare results obtained by the Extended Thomas–Fermi (ETF) method with the compressible liquid drop model (CLDM), based on the thermodynamically consistent description of the surface properties calculated for the two-phase plane interface and the same energy-density functional (for numerical illustration, we applied the Skyrme-type functional SLy4). Our ETF calculations found that pasta phases in cylindrical form cover a significant crustal region (both normal and inverse phases, aka spaghetti and bucatini are presented). Meanwhile, within the applied CLDM framework, which includes the thermodynamically required effect of neutron adsorption on the cluster’s surface but neglects curvature corrections, only the spaghetti phase was found to be energetically favorable in the small density range prior to crust–core transition. On the other hand, the recent CLDM of Dinh Thi et al., 2021, which, on the contrary, accounts for curvature term but neglects neutron adsorption, predicts pasta phase onset in better agreement with the ETF. This fact highlights the importance of the curvature effects and allows counting on the potential validity of the CLDMs as a convenient, transparent and accurate tool for investigation of the pasta-phase properties.
The densest part of neutron star crusts may contain very exotic nuclear configurations, so-called nuclear pasta. We investigate the effect of nuclear symmetry energy on the existence of such phases ...in cold non-accreting neutron stars. For this purpose, we apply three Brussels–Montreal functionals based on generalized Skyrme effective interactions, whose parameters were accurately calibrated to reproduce both experimental data on nuclei and realistic neutron-matter equations of state. These functionals differ in their predictions for the density dependence of the symmetry energy. Within the fourth-order extended Thomas–Fermi method, we find that pasta occupies a wider region of the crust for models with a lower slope of the symmetry energy (and higher symmetry energy at relevant densities) in agreement with previous studies based on pure Thomas–Fermi approximation and compressible liquid-drop models. However, the incorporation of microscopic corrections consistently calculated with the Strutinsky integral method leads to a significant shift of the onset of the pasta phases to higher densities due to the enhanced stability of spherical clusters. As a result, the pasta region shrinks substantially and the role of symmetry energy weakens. This study sheds light on the importance of quantum effects for reliably describing pasta phases in neutron stars.
