Eur. Phys. J. A (2010) 45: 99-110
https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/i2010-10992-0

Regular Article - Theoretical Physics

On the crustal matter of magnetars

Department of Physics, Visva-Bharati, 741 235, Santiniketan, India

Received: 9 October 2009
Revised: 8 May 2010
Accepted: 13 May 2010
Published online: 17 June 2010

Abstract

We have investigated some of the properties of dense sub-nuclear matter at the crustal region (both the outer crust and the inner crust region) of a magnetar. The relativistic version of the Thomas-Fermi (TF) model is used in the presence of a strong quantizing magnetic field for the outer crust matter. The compressed matter in the outer crust, which is a crystal of metallic iron, is replaced by a regular array of spherically symmetric Wigner-Seitz (WS) cells. In the inner crust region, a mixture of iron and heavier neutron-rich nuclei along with electrons and free neutrons has been considered. Conventional Harrison-Wheeler (HW) and Bethe-Baym-Pethick (BBP) equation of states are used for the nuclear mass formula. A lot of significant changes in the characteristic properties of dense crustal matter, both at the outer crust and at the inner crust, have been observed.