The proto-neutron star inner crust in the liquid phase

Abstract

The crust of a neutron star is known to melt at a temperature that increases with increasing matter density, up to about $10^{10}$ K. At such high temperatures and beyond, the crustal ions are put into collective motion and the associated entropy contribution can affect both the thermodynamic properties and the composition of matter. We studied the importance of this effect in different thermodynamic conditions relevant to the inner crust of the proto-neutron star, both at beta equilibrium and in the fixed-proton-fraction regime. To this aim, we solved the hydrodynamic equations for an ion moving in an incompressible, irrotational, and non-viscous fluid, with different boundary conditions, thus leading to different prescriptions for the ion effective mass. We then employed a compressible liquid-drop approach in the one-component plasma approximation, including the renormalisation of the ion mass to account for the influence of the surrounding medium. We show that the cluster size is determined by the competition between the ion centre-of-mass motion and the interface properties, namely the Coulomb, surface, and curvature energies. In particular, including the translational free energy in the minimisation procedure can significantly reduce the optimal number of nucleons in the clusters and lead to an early dissolution of clusters in dense beta-equilibrated matter. On the other hand, we find that the impact of translational motion is reduced in scenarios where the proton fraction is assumed constant and is almost negligible on the inner-crust equation of state. Our results show that the translational degrees of freedom affect the equilibrium composition of beta-equilibrated matter and the density and pressure of the crust-core transition in a non-negligible way, highlighting the importance of its inclusion when modelling the finite-temperature inner crust of the (proto-)neutron star.

14 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• The proto-neutron star inner crust in a multi-component plasma approach
• Time-dependent nuclear energy-density functional theory toolkit for neutron star crust: Dynamics of a nucleus in a neutron superfluid
• Light clusters in the liquid proto-neutron star inner crust
• Neutron Star Inner Crust at Finite Temperatures: A Comparison Between Compressible Liquid Drop and Extended Thomas-Fermi Approaches
• Light clusters as a possible source of crustal impurities: a quasi-particle approach
• Phase transitions in the inner crust of neutron stars within the superfluid band theory: Competition between ${}^1{\text{S}}_0$ pairing and spin polarization under finite temperature and magnetic field
• From supernovae to neutron stars: crust formation time