Collective excitations in the inner crust of neutron stars : supergiant resonances

Abstract

We investigate the nuclear collective excitations of Wigner-Seitz cells containing nuclear clusters immersed in a gas of neutrons. This baryonic non-uniform system is specific to the structure of inner crust matter of neutron stars. The collective excitations are studied in the framework of a spherical Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov + Quasiparticle Random Phase Approximation, formulated in coordinate representation. The calculations are done for two representative Wigner-Seitz cells with baryonic density equal to 0.02 fm$^{-3}$ and 0.08 fm$^{-3}$. It is shown that the excitations with low multipolarities are concentrated almost entirely in one strongly collective mode which exhausts a very large fraction of the energy-weighted sum rule. Since these collective modes are located at very low energies compared to the giant resonances in standard nuclei, they may affect significantly the specific heat of baryonic inner crust matter of neutron stars.