Orateur
Description
Nuclear pasta, which is an inhomogeneous distribution of nuclear matter characterized by non-spherical clustered structures, is expected to occur in a narrow spatial region at the bottom of the inner crust of neutron stars, but the width of the pasta layer is strongly model dependent. In the framework of a compressible liquid-drop model, we use Bayesian inference to analyze the constraints on the sub-saturation energy functional and surface tension imposed by both ab-initio chiral perturbation theory calculations and experimental measurements of nuclear masses. The posterior models are used to obtain general predictions for the crust-pasta and pasta-core transition with controlled uncertainties. A correlation study allows extracting the most influential parameters for the calculation of the pasta phases. The important role of high-order empirical parameters and the surface tension is underlined.
