A new statistical method for the structure of the inner crust of neutron stars

TY - JOUR

T1 - A new statistical method for the structure of the inner crust of neutron stars

AU - Pastore, Alessandro

AU - Shelley, M.

AU - Baroni, Simone

AU - Diget, C. A.

N1 - Invited article for special issue "emerging leaders". This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details

PY - 2017/8/11

Y1 - 2017/8/11

N2 - 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 . The exploration of the energy surface in the 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 per particle. Such a high precision is necessary to distinguish neighbour configurations around the energy minima.

AB - 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 . The exploration of the energy surface in the 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 per particle. Such a high precision is necessary to distinguish neighbour configurations around the energy minima.

KW - Gaussian process emulator

KW - Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov

KW - inner crust

KW - neutron stars

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85028061507&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1088/1361-6471/aa8207

DO - 10.1088/1361-6471/aa8207

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85028061507

SN - 0954-3899

VL - 44

JO - Journal of physics g-Nuclear and particle physics

JF - Journal of physics g-Nuclear and particle physics

IS - 9

M1 - 094003

ER -