Correlations between nuclear incompressibility, liquid-gas critical point, and quarkyonic transition

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationships between nuclear matter properties, liquid-gas critical points, and quarkyonic phase transitions using various models, revealing strong correlations among critical temperature, density, incompressibility, and transition features.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic analysis of how nuclear matter parameters relate to phase transition points and incorporates quarkyonic matter to study their interdependencies.

Findings

Critical temperature and density are strongly correlated.

Incompressibility correlates with critical parameters.

Quarkyonic transition density and sound speed peak are negatively correlated with key nuclear matter properties.

Abstract

We systematically probe different parametrizations of the attractive nuclear force based on real gas models to construct the nuclear matter equation of state. In each of the cases, the repulsion between nucleons is treated in the framework of excluded volume, and interaction parameters are fitted to the empirical properties of the nuclear ground state. We calculate the critical temperature $T_c$ and critical particle number density $n_c$, and find that they are strongly correlated. Both are also correlated with the incompressibility $K_0$ in the nuclear ground state. We also include a quarkyonic matter phase in the quasiparticle description and investigate the relationships among $K_0$, transition density to the quarkyonic phase, $n_{tr}$, and corresponding peak in the speed of sound, $v_{s, {\rm max}}^2$. At each density, the quark fraction is found by minimizing the energy density. We find that both $n_{tr}$ and $v_{s, {\rm max}}^2$ are negatively correlated with $K_0$, $n_c$, and $T_c$.