The elastic properties of rod and plate phases of neutron star matter were studied by Pethick &
Potekhin [325]. As they stressed, the physical reasons for the forming of mesomorphic phases in neutron
star crusts are very different from those relevant to liquid crystals in laboratory. For terrestrial liquid
crystals it is the interaction between very nonspherical molecules, which drives them to form rods and
plates. In a neutron star crust the mechanism consists in spontaneous symmetry breaking, resulting from
competition between the Coulomb energy and nuclear surface energy. We will follow closely Pethick &
Potekhin [325
]. They calculated the energies of mesomorphic phases using the generalized liquid drop
model. The plate phase has rotational symmetry about any axis perpendicular to the plates, and is
therefore similar to the smectics A phase of liquid crystals [115
]. Let the z-axis coincide with the symmetry
axis of the equilibrium configuration. Only a displacement in the z-direction is opposed by a restoring force.
Therefore, we consider only
. The deformation energy of a unit volume is then [115
]
In the case of the rod phase, also called the columnar phase [115], the number of elastic moduli is larger. They describe the increase in energy density due to compression, dilatation, transverse shearing, and bending of the rod lattice. Elastic moduli were calculated within the liquid drop model by Pethick & Potekhin [325] and by Watanabe, Iida & Sato [419, 420].
At the microscopic scale (fermis), the elastic properties of the nuclear pastas are very different from those of a body-centered–cubic crystal of spherical nuclei. Nevertheless, the effects of pasta phases on the elastic properties of neutron star crusts may not be so dramatic at large scales (let’s say meters). Indeed these nuclear pastas are necessarily of finite extent since one and two-dimensional long-range crystalline orders cannot exist in infinite systems (see, for instance, [157] and references therein). How the nuclear pastas arrange themselves remains to be studied, but it is likely that the resulting configurations look more-or-less isotropic at macroscopic scales.
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