  We investigate the structure of neutron star crusts, including the crust-core
boundary, based on new Skyrme mean field models constrained by the bulk-matter
equation of state from chiral effective field theory and the ground-state
energies of doubly-magic nuclei. Nuclear pasta phases are studied using both
the liquid drop model as well as the Thomas-Fermi approximation. We compare the
energy per nucleon for each geometry (spherical nuclei, cylindrical nuclei,
nuclear slabs, cylindrical holes, and spherical holes) to obtain the ground
state phase as a function of density. We find that the size of the Wigner-Seitz
cell depends strongly on the model parameters, especially the coefficients of
the density gradient interaction terms. We employ also the thermodynamic
instability method to check the validity of the numerical solutions based on
energy comparisons.
