Liquid-gas phase transition in nuclear matter from realistic many-body approaches

TL;DR

This paper investigates the liquid-gas phase transition in nuclear matter using realistic many-body approaches, revealing significant differences in critical properties depending on the interaction models and approximations used.

Contribution

It is the first study to analyze the phase transition in homogeneous nuclear matter using the Self-Consistent Green's Functions method.

Findings

Critical temperature decreases compared to Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approximation.

Different nucleon-nucleon interactions lead to large variations in critical point properties.

Substantial impact of many-body approach on phase transition characteristics.

Abstract

The existence of a liquid-gas phase transition for hot nuclear systems at subsaturation densities is a well established prediction of finite temperature nuclear many-body theory. In this paper, we discuss for the first time the properties of such phase transition for homogeneous nuclear matter within the Self-Consistent Green's Functions approach. We find a substantial decrease of the critical temperature with respect to the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approximation. Even within the same approximation, the use of two different realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions gives rise to large differences in the properties of the critical point.