Survey of nuclear pasta in the intermediate-density regime: Shapes and energies

The likely existence of nonuniform nuclear matter (nuclear pasta) in astrophysical scenarios has been studied for some time. It is believed to emerge due to the competition between the long-range Coulomb force and the short-range strong force. This paper performs a comparative study of different nuclear pasta shapes and shows that all studied configurations are lower in energy than uniform matter for a large range of proton fractions and that different shapes can coexist, both at low and high temperatures.