Is there pasta in neutron stars?

The interior of neutron stars may contain a mantle made of very exotic neutron-proton clusters with unusual shapes such as rods or slabs collectively referred to as “nuclear pastas” coexisting with free nucleons and a charge neutralizing gas of electrons. Adding shell and pairing effects perturbatively and consistently to the fourth-order extended Thomas-Fermi method using the Brussels-Montreal functional BSk24, we find that nuclear pastas are much less abundant than previously thought from liquid-drop models, thus questioning their very existence in neutron stars