Divergence of the isospin-asymmetry expansion of the nuclear equation of state in many-body perturbation theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates the convergence and accuracy of the isospin-asymmetry expansion of the nuclear equation of state using many-body perturbation theory, revealing regimes where higher-order terms are detrimental or negligible.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the isospin-asymmetry expansion coefficients and identifies the significance of a leading logarithmic term at zero temperature.

Findings

Higher-order terms worsen the expansion at low temperature and high density.

At high temperature and low density, higher-order interaction contributions are negligible.

The leading logarithmic term improves the zero-temperature isospin-asymmetry description.

Abstract

The isospin-asymmetry dependence of the nuclear matter equation of state obtained from microscopic chiral two- and three-body interactions in second-order many-body perturbation theory is examined in detail. The quadratic, quartic and sextic coefficients in the Maclaurin expansion of the free energy per particle of infinite homogeneous nuclear matter with respect to the isospin asymmetry are extracted numerically using finite differences, and the resulting polynomial isospin-asymmetry parametrizations are compared to the full isospin-asymmetry dependence of the free energy. It is found that in the low-temperature and high-density regime where the radius of convergence of the expansion is generically zero, the inclusion of higher-order terms beyond the leading quadratic approximation leads overall to a significantly poorer description of the isospin-asymmetry dependence. In contrast, at high temperatures and densities well below nuclear saturation density, the interaction contributions to the higher-order coefficients are negligible and the deviations from the quadratic approximation are predominantly from the noninteracting term in the many-body perturbation series. Furthermore, we extract the leading logarithmic term in the isospin-asymmetry expansion of the equation of state at zero temperature from the analysis of linear combinations of finite differences. It is shown that the logarithmic term leads to a considerably improved description of the isospin-asymmetry dependence at zero temperature.