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Neutron star crust and outer core equation of state from chiral effective field theory with quantified uncertainties

H. Göttling1,2,*, L. Hoff1,2,†, K. Hebeler1,2,3,‡, and A. Schwenk1,2,3,§

  • *Contact author: hannah.goettling@tu-darmstadt.de
  • †Contact author: luis.hoff@stud.tu-darmstadt.de
  • ‡Contact author: kai.hebeler@tu-darmstadt.de
  • §Contact author: schwenk@physik.tu-darmstadt.de
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Phys. Rev. C 113, 055804 – Published 11 May, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/t9y8-nbf4

Abstract

We study the order-by-order expansion of the energy per particle of asymmetric nuclear matter up to twice saturation density in chiral effective field theory (EFT) within a Bayesian framework. For this, we develop a two-dimensional Gaussian process (2D GP) that is trained using many-body perturbation theory results based on chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions from leading to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO). This allows for an efficient evaluation of the equation of state (EOS) and thermodynamic derivatives with EFT truncation uncertainties. After benchmarking our 2D GP against Bayesian uncertainties for pure neutron matter and symmetric matter, we study the energy per particle, pressure, and chemical potentials of neutron star matter in β equilibrium including EFT uncertainties. We investigate the phase diagram of neutron-rich matter from neutron- to proton-drip and to the uniform phase, including surface and Coulomb corrections. Based on this, we construct EOSs for the inner crust of neutron stars that are consistent with the chiral EFT results for uniform matter at N3LO.

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Phys. Rev. C 113, 055804– Published 11 May, 2026
  • Received 8 January 2026
  • Accepted 6 April 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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