  A compressible liquid-drop approach adjusted to uniform matter many-body
calculations based on chiral EFT interactions and to the experimental nuclear
masses is used to investigate the neutron star crust properties. Eight chiral
EFT hamiltonians and a representative phenomenological force (SLy4) are
confronted. We show that some properties of the crust, e.g. clusters mass,
charge, and asymmetry, are mostly determined by symmetric matter properties
close to saturation density and are therefore mainly constrained by
experimental nuclear masses, while other properties, e.g., energy per particle,
pressure, sound speed, are mostly influenced by low-density predictions in
neutron matter, where chiral EFT and phenomenological forces substantially
differ.
