# Bayesian analysis of the crust-core transition with a compressible liquid-drop model

## TL;DR

This paper uses Bayesian methods and a compressible liquid-drop model to analyze the neutron star crust-core transition, highlighting the dominant role of surface properties and providing constrained estimates of transition density and pressure.

## Contribution

It introduces a Bayesian framework combined with a CLD model to quantify uncertainties in the crust-core transition parameters of neutron stars, emphasizing the impact of surface properties.

## Key findings

- Transition density estimated as 0.072±0.011 fm⁻³.
- Transition pressure estimated as 0.339±0.115 MeV fm⁻³.
- Surface properties strongly influence transition characteristics.

## Abstract

The crust-core phase transition of neutron stars is quantitatively studied within a unified meta-modelling of the nuclear Equation of State (EoS). The variational equations in the crust are solved within a Compressible Liquid Drop (CLD) approach, with surface parameters consistently optimized for each EoS set on experimental nuclear mass data. When EoS parameters are taken from known Skyrme or RMF functionals, the transition point of those models is nicely reproduced. A model-independent probability distribution of EoS parameters and of the transition density and pressure is determined with a Bayesian analysis, where the prior is given by an uncorrelated distribution of parameters within the present empirical uncertainties, and constraints are applied both from neutron star physics and ab-initio modelling. We show that the characteristics of the transition point are largely independent of the high density properties of the EoS, while ab-initio EoS calculations of neutron and symmetric matter are far more constraining. The most influential parameter for the determination of the transition point governs the surface properties of extremely neutron rich matter, and it is strongly unconstrained. This explains the large dispersion of existing predictions of the transition point. Only if the surface tension is fixed to a reasonable but somewhat arbitrary value, strong correlations with isovector parameters ($L_{sym},K_{sym}$ and $Q_{sym}$) are recovered. Within the present experimental and theoretical uncertainties on those parameters, we estimate the transition density as $n_t= 0.072\pm 0.011$ fm$^{-3}$ and the transition pressure as $P_t=0.339\pm0.115$ MeV fm$^{-3}$.