Analytical determination of the structure of the outer crust of a cold nonaccreted neutron star: extension to strongly quantizing magnetic fields

TL;DR

This paper extends an iterative method to determine the outer crust structure of magnetars by incorporating Landau-Rabi quantization effects due to intense magnetic fields, providing analytical solutions for layer transitions.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical approach for modeling neutron star crusts under strong magnetic fields, enhancing previous methods for magnetar studies.

Findings

Method efficiently handles strongly quantizing magnetic fields.

Analytical solutions improve transition calculations between crustal layers.

Numerical results demonstrate high precision of the extended method.

Abstract

The iterative method recently proposed for determining the internal constitution of the outer crust of a nonaccreted neutron star is extended to magnetars by taking into account the Landau-Rabi quantization of electron motion induced by the presence of a very high magnetic field. It is shown that in the strongly quantizing regime, the method can be efficiently implemented using new analytical solutions for the transitions between adjacent crustal layers. Detailed numerical computations are performed to assess the performance and precision of the method.