Locating the inner edge of neutron star crust using terrestrial nuclear laboratory data

2008/07/31 by Jun Xu, Lie-Wen Chen, Bao-An Li +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.79.035802

published as Phys.Rev.C79:035802,2009 · 6 pages, 4 figures, section heads added and typos fixed, version to appear in PRC

arxiv created 2009/03/15 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01

Abstract

Within both dynamical and thermodynamical approaches using the equation of state for neutron-rich nuclear matter constrained by the recent isospin diffusion data from heavy-ion reactions in the same sub-saturation density range as the neutron star crust, the density and pressure at the inner edge separating the liquid core from the solid crust of neutron stars are determined to be 0.040 fm^-3 ≤ ρ_t≤ 0.065 fm^-3 and 0.01 MeV/fm³ ≤ P_t≤ 0.26 MeV/fm³, respectively. These together with the observed minimum crustal fraction of the total moment of inertia allow us to set a new limit for the radius of the Vela pulsar significantly different from the previous estimate. It is further shown that the widely used parabolic approximation to the equation of state of asymmetric nuclear matter leads systematically to significantly higher core-crust transition densities and pressures, especially with stiffer symmetry energy functionals.

Cited by

• Stability of the β-equilibrated dense matter and core-crust transition in neutron stars

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