Twist-averaged boundary conditions for nuclear pasta Hartree-Fock calculations

Abstract

The authors provide a significant advance in the description of nuclear pasta, a form of nuclear matter present in the inner crust of neutron stars. The authors achieve this in a 3-D Hartree-Fock approach by removing spurious contributions, to the energy, that appeared in prior approaches when periodic boundary conditions were used. The authors benchmark so-called twist-averaged boundary conditions for a free nucleonic gas and obtain reliable results for nuclear rods and slabs and for more elaborate phases.