Spinodal instability in nuclear matter with light cluster degrees of freedom

TL;DR

This paper explores how light clusters affect the thermodynamic stability and phase behavior of low-density nuclear matter at finite temperature, revealing new insights into cluster dynamics and instabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized mean-field approach including light clusters and analyzes the impact of an infrared cutoff on stability and mode character in nuclear matter.

Findings

Infrared cutoff influences the stability boundary and mode character.

Density-dependent cutoff causes clusters to fluctuate out of phase with nucleons.

Results have implications for heavy-ion collisions and neutron-star crusts.

Abstract

We investigate the thermodynamical stability of low-density isospin-symmetric nuclear matter at finite temperature, explicitly including light clusters as degrees of freedom. Within a generalized mean-field framework, we compute the curvature matrix of the free-energy density and determine the spinodal region, identifying the conditions under which mechanically unstable modes may develop in the presence of clustering. Particular attention is devoted to the formal consequences of introducing an infrared momentum cutoff in the density and current moments, which effectively accounts for Pauli-blocking effects and the associated reduction of low-momentum quasiparticle states in the medium. We show that when the cutoff is density dependent, thermodynamic consistency requires additional contributions to the chemical potentials and extra terms also appear in the first hydrodynamic moment, influencing both the stability analysis and the location of the spinodal boundary. We further examine the character of the unstable modes and find that a sufficiently stiff density dependence of the cutoff may drive clusters to fluctuate out of phase with nucleons, pushing them toward low-density regions while nucleonic instabilities grow, in contrast with the in-phase pattern obtained when in-medium effects are neglected. Our results shed new light on the role of light clusters in the phase dynamics of warm, dilute nuclear matter, with implications for heavy-ion collisions and for the physics of neutron-star crusts.