Spinodal Instabilities in Nuclear Matter in a Stochastic Relativistic Mean-Field Approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates spinodal instabilities and the early growth of baryon density fluctuations in symmetric nuclear matter using a stochastic relativistic mean-field approach, revealing differences from non-relativistic models.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic relativistic mean-field method to study nuclear matter instabilities, highlighting qualitative differences from non-relativistic Skyrme-based calculations.

Findings

Most unstable behavior occurs at higher baryon densities (~0.4ρ₀) in the relativistic approach.

Most unstable behavior occurs at lower baryon densities (~0.2ρ₀) in non-relativistic calculations.

The relativistic approach shows a different density dependence of instabilities compared to non-relativistic models.

Abstract

Spinodal instabilities and early growth of baryon density fluctuations in symmetric nuclear matter are investigated in the basis of stochastic extension of relativistic mean-field approach in the semi-classical approximation. Calculations are compared with the results of non-relativistic calculations based on Skyrme-type effective interactions under similar conditions. A qualitative difference appears in the unstable response of the system: the system exhibits most unstable behavior at higher baryon densities around $\rho_{b}=0.4 ~\rho_{0}$ in the relativistic approach while most unstable behavior occurs at lower baryon densities around $\rho_{b}=0.2 ~\rho_{0}$ in the non-relativistic calculations