Talk:Nuclear pasta

Developing this page
I am a physicist who works on nuclear pasta sims and I think this article would be greatly improved by the addition of a little bit of detail. It's a very active field right now and it's a shame that this article is really undeveloped. I see that this page was proposed for deletion because someone was afraid nuclear pasta isn't notable. There are approximately 100 papers in the literature that directly pertain to nuclear pasta - the arxiv contains many of them as well as proceedings from various conferences.

Nuclear pasta is relevant to more than the extreme limits of applicability of theoretical nuclear physics- it's not just something dopey on paper, we actually think it exists in the crusts of neutron stars, and it's predicted to have a major effect on the the decay of magnetic fields of pulsars, and in the production of gravitational waves.

How can I help? I've never contributed to Wikipedia before, but I'm very familiar with the scientific literature on nuclear pasta and I'd contribute if knew how. Are there any more experienced contributors that would be willing to help me flesh out an article in more detail and edit my writing to get it up to par with Wikipedia's standards? First question: are there templates for scientific articles or articles about active research?

Sudoiusudo (talk) 00:03, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Welcome, Sudoiusudo! I was one of the folks who argued for this being a real topic. It's great that you want to help expand this stub of an article and we welcome your expertise. I'm no expert, but have been around a while and would be happy to help answer questions. There is also WikiProject Physics page where the folks editing physics articles tend to hang out and the associated talk page Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics is for questions and discussions.


 * For articles, there isn't much of a template. The general order of an article goes as
 * Lead
 * Introduction/Overview
 * Sections with details, history, etc...
 * References


 * The lead explains what the topic is about and provides a short summary of the article. It should be generally be written as simply as possible so that a general reader (well, maybe a Scientific American reader) can get some informal, intuitive idea of the what nuclear pasta is about and why it is interesting and important. The intro/overview tells in more detail what this is about. The subsequent sections are up to you. Some possible sections may be Properties, Experimental evidence, Mathematical model, etc. The References is the bibliography. Take a look at other articles, like Neutron star to get an idea of the layout. You can also look at the source code to get a feel for Wiki markup if that is new to you.


 * It's important to remember that like any encyclopedia, WP is less bleeding edge and more trailing edge. Articles are ideally based on secondary sources like review papers or books. Peer-reviewed papers are of course fine, too. Papers only on Arxiv have not been peer reviewed, so aren't considered reliable sources for an article. As long as what you write is pretty much based on the references you cite, you're in good shape.


 * My last advice is to be bold! This article can only be helped by your improvements, so don't worry too much about making mistakes along the way. --Mark viking (talk) 04:26, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Agreed. Wikipedia needs more science experts like you, and I would certainly be willing to collaborate on this article, though my knowledge of astrophysics is rather low – I saved this article from deletion but had no idea how to expand it. Altamel (talk) 19:04, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Great, thanks for the input guys. As far as sources go, many of the papers on the arxiv are preprints of papers in proper journals, and there was a lot of press in the past year (Science Daily has a few good articles which distill prominent scientific papers), as well as university press releases (such as the one source from the IU Visualization Lab). What's the deal with pictures? NPasta is a very 'geometric' phenoemena, and a visualization of the different phases (which are present in the literature, and also at that IU Visualization lab source) and perhaps a cross section of a neutron star (such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Neutron_star_cross_section.svg) would be great additions. Is there an easy way to edit that image to label the inner crust as being the region where pasta occurs? Sudoiusudo (talk) 21:11, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * If the papers are published, referring to the Arxiv preprints is fine. It is just the papers that are on Arxiv, but have not been published, that are considered not-yet reliable sources. For pictures, I'm no expert, but the basic idea is that you can only upload pictures that you have created yourself or that have an explicit license to be freely redistributed, e.g., a create commons license. The pic you refer to is an SVG file. I'd download the file, edit it with an SVG editor like Inkscape, and then upload it under a new name, so you don't trample other uses of the file. --Mark viking (talk) 22:04, 2 October 2013 (UTC)


 * So I've written a section on the pasta formation, which I hope is accessible to a nonscientist audience. I could add the chunk of text straight to the article, but I'd prefer an experienced editor take a look at it first. Could I PM it to you? Also, how do I send a private message on here? Sudoiusudo (talk) 16:13, 4 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I'd be happy to take a look. If you would like to send me a message, that is generally done by posting on my talk page, at talk. If you want to send a private message, go to my user page at Mark viking. At the sidebar on left of the page should be a link, Email this user under the Toolbox heading. --Mark viking (talk) 21:27, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

what's the radius and mass of a typical neutron star?
This article says the radius is 12 kilometers; the article Neutron star says 10. This article says the mass is 1.4 solar masses; the article Neutron star says 2. While there's a range, it seems odd that the heavier neutron stars would be smaller. Can we get something consistent between articles? John Baez (talk) 04:55, 5 August 2017 (UTC)

Elasticity and Strength
There's recent article describing the elasticity and strength of nuclear pasta, stating that "Our results show that nuclear pasta may be the strongest known material, perhaps with a shear modulus of 10^30 ergs/cm^3 and breaking strain greater than 0.1." I think that deserves mention in the article. Pulu (talk) 15:43, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Does neutron liquid appear or disappear as you go deeper?
The Phases section describes nuclear pasta under greater pressures as being ever bigger sorta-nuclei surrounded by ever smaller proportions of neutron liquid. But then at the core, under greater pressure still, it suddenly goes the other way and says that the matter there is all neutron liquid. Is there actually a proportion inversion, or are the pasta holes not actually full of neutron liquid, or what? And what is "neutron liquid" in the first place? 2601:1C0:8601:C0F0:E1CD:5222:14E5:C2D8 (talk) 05:14, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Fair point, Mr.Q. (Please sign up and sign in sometime.) It would make more logical sense to me if the voids were filled with electron-degeneracy plasma (white dwarf matter, also a crustal layer outside this one) instead of "neutron liquid", which I think is a corrected concept of the legendary 'neutronium'. jimswen (talk) 03:11, 6 March 2022 (UTC)

Or, if the voids are indeed neutron superfluid, the sequence from gnocci to Swiss cheess should be inverted. I also don't know where, relative to the sequence, occurs the pressure that forces p+e->n, the formation of the neutron liquid. jimswen (talk) 03:34, 6 March 2022 (UTC)


 * Original poster here (look, signed in now!). I don't think the voids are filled with "electron degeneracy plasma", because as far as I can tell, the pasta noodles are the nuclei of the electron degeneracy plasma, which is gradually losing its electron content to inverse beta decay. I think the voids are empty except for the remaining degenerate electrons, that "neutron liquid" must refer to the material of the noodles, and that saying that "immersed in neutron liquid" is a straight-up error. --Dalek955 (talk) 18:45, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Link in reference #3 is not working
Hello all. I just wanted to point out that the link in reference #3 isn't working. I get the following error from my webbrowser (Firefox): SSL_ERROR_UNSUPPORTED_VERSION. Maybe the link could be updated or replaced. Thank you.--2A02:908:F765:F320:943B:A39D:6AD7:9887 (talk) 11:32, 18 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing that out. I've added the archived URL to the ref. Schazjmd   (talk)  14:43, 18 May 2022 (UTC)