Microscopic predictions of the nuclear matter liquid-gas phase transition

TL;DR

This paper provides first-principles predictions for the nuclear matter liquid-gas phase transition, analyzing systematic uncertainties from different chiral interactions and many-body methods, and estimates the critical temperature around 16 MeV.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of systematic errors in microscopic predictions of the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition using various chiral forces and many-body approaches.

Findings

Critical temperature estimated at 16 ± 2 MeV.

Systematic uncertainties mainly from Hamiltonian choices.

Strong correlation between critical temperature and saturation energy.

Abstract

We present first-principle predictions for the liquid-gas phase transition in symmetric nuclear matter employing both two- and three-nucleon chiral interactions. Our discussion focuses on the sources of systematic errors in microscopic quantum many body predictions. On the one hand, we test uncertainties of our results arising from changes in the construction of chiral Hamiltonians. We use five different chiral forces with consistently derived three-nucleon interactions. On the other hand, we compare the ladder resummation in the self-consistent Green's functions approach to finite temperature Brueckner--Hartree--Fock calculations. We find that systematics due to Hamiltonians dominate over many-body uncertainties. Based on this wide pool of calculations, we estimate that the critical temperature is $T_c=16 \pm 2$ MeV, in reasonable agreement with experimental results. We also find that there is a strong correlation between the critical temperature and the saturation energy in microscopic many-body simulations.