Diffusion and Magnetic Fields in Simulations of Neutron Star Crusts

Accreted neutron star crusts exhibit rich variety in their crystal structure because of the mixture of elements produced by burning accreted H and He. Diffusion coefficients in these crystals remain uncertain, but could be important for crustal physics including breaking. This talk will discuss some recent work using molecular dynamics simulations to study diffusion in Coulomb crystals and the impacts of diffusion on neutron star crusts. Additionally, highly magnetized crusts remain important for a long list of transient phenomena and we will describe some ongoing and near future work to develop new capabilities in our molecular dynamics formalism to simulate the nuclear pasta layer with magnetic fields.