Hard-core Radius of Nucleons within the Induced Surface Tension Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel induced surface tension approach to model the equations of state for hadronic and nuclear matter, constraining the nucleon hard-core radius to 0.30--0.36 fm based on properties of low-density strongly interacting matter.

Contribution

The work develops a new modeling approach using induced surface tension to determine the nucleon hard-core radius from nuclear matter properties.

Findings

Nucleon hard-core radius is constrained to 0.30--0.36 fm.

The approach successfully describes low-density strongly interacting matter.

Nucleon radius likely depends on temperature and density in neutron star conditions.

Abstract

In this work we discuss a novel approach to model the hadronic and nuclear matter equations of state using the induced surface tension concept. Since the obtained equations of state, classical and quantum, are among the most successful ones in describing the properties of low density phases of strongly interacting matter, they set strong restrictions on the possible value of the hard-core radius of nucleons. Therefore, we perform a detailed analysis of its value which follows from hadronic and nuclear matter properties and find the most trustworthy range of its values: the hard-core radius of nucleons is 0.30--0.36 fm. A comparison with the phenomenology of neutron stars implies that the hard-core radius of nucleons has to be temperature and density dependent.