English

How accurately can the Extended Thomas-Fermi method describe the inner crust of a neutron star?

Nuclear Theory 2020-12-09 v1

Abstract

We perform a systematic comparison between the results obtained by solving fully self-consistently the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov equations, and those obtained using the semi-classical Extended Thomas-Fermi method, for various Wigner-Seitz cells within the inner crust of a neutron star. The lack of pairing correlations in the semi-classical approach leads to a large discrepancy between the two approaches. This discrepancy is well beyond the error of the quantum-mechanical calculation, and is related to spurious shell effects in the neutron gas.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.01839,
  title  = {How accurately can the Extended Thomas-Fermi method describe the inner crust of a neutron star?},
  author = {Matthew Shelley and Alessandro Pastore},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.01839},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Journal of Physics: Conference Series