Adding crust to BPS Skyrme neutron stars

Abstract: The Skyrme model and its generalisations provide a conceptually appealing field-theory basis for the description of nuclear matter and, after its coupling to gravity, also of neutron stars. In particular, a specific Skyrme submodel, the so-called Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield (BPS) Skyrme model, allows both for an exact field-theoretic and a mean-field treatment of neutron stars, as a consequence of its perfect fluid property. A pure BPS Skyrme model description of neutron stars, however, only describes the neutron star core, by construction. Here we consider different possibilities to extrapolate a BPS Skyrme neutron star at high baryon density to a description valid at lower densities. In the exact field-theoretic case, a simple effective description of the neutron star crust can be used, because the exact BPS Skyrme neutron star solutions formally extend to sufficiently low densities. In the mean-field case, on the other hand, the BPS Skyrme neutron star solutions always remain above the nuclear saturation density and, therefore, must be joined to a different nuclear physics equation of state already for the outer core. We study the resulting neutron stars in both cases, facilitating an even more complete comparison between Skyrmionic neutron stars and neutron stars obtained from other approaches, as well as with observations.