The energetic properties of nuclear clusters inside a low-density, finite-temperature medium are studied with a Lattice Gas Model including isospin dependence and Coulomb forces. Important deviations are observed respect to the Fisher approximation of an ideal gas of non-interacting clusters, but the global energetics can still be approximately expressed in terms of a simple modified energy-density functional. The multi-fragmentation regime appears dominated by combinatorial effects in this model, but the isoscaling of the largest fragment in low energy collisions appears a promising observable for the experimental measurement of the symmetry energy.
Isotopic spin dependent lattice gas model is used to examine if it produces the isoscaling behaviour seen in intermediate energy heavy ion collisions. Qualitative features are reproduced but quantitative agreement with experiments is lacking.
The isoscaling behavior is investigated using the isotopic/isobaric yields from the equilibrated thermal source which is prepared by the lattice gas model for lighter systems with A = 36. The isoscaling parameters $α$ and -$β$ are observed to drop with temperature. The difference of neutron and proton chemical potential shows a turning point around 5 MeV where the liquid gas phase transition occurs in the model. The relative free neutron or proton density shows a nearly linear relation with the N/Z (neutron to proton ratio) of system and the isospin fractionation is observed.
The isoscaling parameter usually denoted by $α$ depends upon both the symmetry energy coefficient and the isotopic contents of the dissociating systems. We compute $α$ in theoretical models: first in a simple mean field model and then in thermodynamic models using both grand canonical and canonical ensembles. For finite systems the canonical ensemble is much more appropriate. The model values of $α$ are compared with a much used standard formula. Next we turn to cases where in experiments, there are significant deviations from isoscaling. We show that in such cases, although the grand canonica…
Using different parameterizations of the nuclear mass formula, we study the sensitivity of the isoscaling parameters to the mass formula employed in grand-canonical calculations. Previous works on isoscaling have suggested that the symmetry energy implied in such calculations is anomalously smaller than that suggested by fits to nuclear masses. We show that surface corrections to the symmetry energy naturally broadens the isotopic distribution thus allowing for values of the symmetry energy which more closely match those obtained from nuclear masses.
Based on an extended compound nucleus model, isospin effects in statistical fragment emission from excited nuclear systems are investigated. An experimentally observed scaling behavior of the ratio of isotope yields $Y_i(N,Z)$ from two similar emitting sources with different neutron-to-proton ratios is predicted theoretically, i.e., the relationship of $Y_2/Y_1 \propto exp(αN + βZ)$ is demonstrated. The symmetry energy coefficient $C_{sym}$ extracted from the simulation results is $\sim$ 27 MeV which is consistent with realistic theoretical estimates and recent experimental data. The influence…
Extensive calculations on isoscaling behavior with the sequential-decay model gemini are performed for the medium-to-heavy nuclei in the mass range A = 60-120 at excitation energies up to 3 MeV/nucleon. The comparison between the products after the first-step decay and the ones after the entire-steps decay demonstrates that there exists a strong sequential decay effect on the final isoscaling parameters and the apparent temperature. Results show that the apparent symmetry energy coefficient $γ_{app}$ does not reflect the initial symmetry energy coefficient $C_{sym}$ embedded in the mass calcul…
The symmetry energy, temperature, density and isoscaling parameter, in $^{58}$Ni + $^{58}$Ni, $^{58}$Fe + $^{58}$Ni and $^{58}$Fe + $^{58}$Fe reactions at beam energies of 30, 40 and 47 MeV/nucleon, are studied as a function of excitation energy of the multifragmenting source. It is shown that the decrease in the isoscaling parameter is related to the near flattening of the temperature in the caloric curve, and the decrease in the density and the symmetry energy with increasing excitation energy. The decrease in the symmetry energy is mainly a consequence of decreasing density with increasing …
Isoscaling behavior of the statistical emission fragments from the equilibrated sources with $Z$ = 30 and $N$ = 30, 33, 36 and 39, resepectively, is investigated in the framework of isospin dependent lattice gas model. The dependences of isoscaling parameters $α$ on source isospin asymmetry, temperature and freeze-out density are studied and the "symmetry energy" is deduced from isoscaling parameters. Results show that "symmetry energy" $C_{sym}$ is insensitive to the change of temperature but follows the power-law dependence on the freeze-out density $ρ$. The later gives $C_{sym}$ = 30$(ρ/ρ_0…
The isoscaling properties of the primary and final products are studied via isospin dependent quantum molecular dynamics (IQMD) model and the followed sequential decay model GEMINI, respectively. It is found that the isoscaling parameters $α$ of both primary and final products keep no significant change for light fragments, but increases with the mass for intermediate and heavy products. The dynamical effects on isoscaling are exhibited by that $α$ value decreases a little with the evolution time of the system, and opposite trend for the heavy products. The secondary decay effects on isoscalin…
The properties of the nuclear isoscaling at finite temperature are investigated and the extent to which its parameter $α$ holds information on the symmetry energy is examined. We show that, although finite temperature effects invalidate the analytical formulas that relate the isoscaling parameter $α$ to those of the mass formula, the symmetry energy remains the main ingredient that dictates the behavior of $α$ at finite temperatures, even for very different sources. This conclusion is not obvious as it is not true in the vanishing temperature limit, where analytical formulas are available. Our…
Isotopic effects observed in fragmentation reactions induced by protons, deuterons, and alpha particles of incident energies between 660 MeV and 15.3 GeV on 112-Sn and 124-Sn targets are discussed. The exponential scaling of the yield ratios with the third component of the fragment isospin (N-Z)/2 is observed in all reactions, with scaling parameters that depend on the incident energy. Breakup temperatures for these reactions are deduced from double ratios of isotopic yields and tested for their relation with the isoscaling parameters. The quantum statistical (QSM) and the statistical multifra…
The isoscaling behavior is investigated in the frame of Isospin dependent Quantum Molecular Dynamics (IQMD) models. The isotopic yields ratio $Y_2$/$Y_1$ for reactions $^{48}Ca$+$^{48}Ca$ and $^{40}Ca+^{40}Ca$ at different entrance channels are simulated and presented, the relationship between the isoscaling parameter and the entrance channel is analyzed, the results show that $α$ and $β$ reduce with the rise of incident energies and increase with the impact parameter b, which can be attributed to the temperature varying of the pre-fragments in different entrance channels. The relation of $α$ …
The isospin effect and isoscaling behavior in projectile fragmentation have been systematically investigated by a modified statistical abrasion-ablation (SAA) model. The normalized peak differences and reduced isoscaling parameters are found to decrease with ($Z_{proj}-Z$)/$Z_{proj}$ or the excitation energy per nucleon and have no significant dependence on the size of reaction systems. Assuming a Fermi-gas behavior, the excitation energy dependence of the symmetry energy coefficients are tentatively extracted from $α$ and $β$ which looks consistent with the experimental data. It is pointed ou…
Investigation of observables from nuclear multifragmentation reactions depending on isospin led to the development of a hybrid model. The mass and charge distribution as well as isotopic distribution was studied using this model for $^{112}$Sn+$^{112}$Sn reaction as well as $^{124}$Sn+$^{124}$Sn reactions at different energies. The agreement of the results obtained from the model with those from experimental data confirms the accuracy of the model. Isoscaling coefficients were extracted from these observables which can throw light on the symmetry energy coefficient. Another important facet of …
The antisymmetrized molecular dynamics (AMD) simulations suggest that the isospin composition of fragments produced dynamically in multifragmentation reactions is basically governed by the symmetry energy of low-density uniform nuclear matter rather than the symmetry energy for the ground-state finite nuclei. After the statistical secondary decay of the excited fragments, the symmetry energy effect still remains in the fragment isospin composition, though the effect in the isoscaling parameter seems a very delicate problem.
Different formulas relying measurable fragment isotopic observables to the symmetry energy of excited nuclei have been proposed and applied to the analysis of heavy ion collision data in the recent literature. In this paper we examine the quality of the different expressions in the framework of the McGill Canonical Thermodynamic Model. We show that even in the idealized situation of canonical equilibrium and in the absence of secondary decay, these formulas do not give a precise reconstruction of the symmetry energy of the fragmenting source. However, both isotopic widths and isoscaling appear…
The density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy is inspected using the Statistical Multifragmentation Model with Skyrme effective interactions. The model consistently considers the expansion of the fragments' volumes at finite temperature at the freeze-out stage. By selecting parameterizations of the Skyrme force that lead to very different equations of state for the symmetry energy, we investigate the sensitivity of different observables to the properties of the effective forces. Our results suggest that, in spite of being sensitive to the thermal dilation of the fragments' volumes, it …
A new method of accessing information on the symmetry free energy from yields of fragments produced in Fermi-energy heavy-ion collisions is proposed. Furthermore, by means of quantum fluctuation analysis techniques, correlations between extracted symmetry free-energy coefficients with temperature and density were studied. The obtained results are consistent with those of commonly used isoscaling techniques.
It is shown that the experimentally observed decrease of the nuclear symmetry energy with the increasing centrality or the excitation energy in isotopic scaling analyses of heavy-ion reactions can be well understood analytically within a degenerate Fermi gas model. The evolution of the symmetry energy is found to be mainly due to the variation in the freeze-out density rather than temperature. The isoscaling analyses are useful for probing the interaction part of the nuclear symmetry energy, provided that both the freeze-out temperature and density of the fragments can be inferred simultaneous…
Using covariance analysis, we quantify the correlations between the interaction parameters in a transport model and the observables commonly used to extract information of the Equation of State of Asymmetric Nuclear Matter in experiments. By simulating $^{124}$Sn+$^{124}$Sn, $^{124}$Sn+$^{112}$Sn and $^{112}$Sn+$^{112}$Sn reactions at beam energies of 50 and 120 MeV per nucleon, we have identified that the nucleon effective mass splitting are most strongly correlated to the neutrons and protons yield ratios with high kinetic energy from central collisions especially at high incident energy. Th…
The density dependence of the symmetry energy in the equation of state of isospin asymmetric nuclear matter is of significant importance for studying the structure of systems as diverse as the neutron-rich nuclei and the neutron stars. A number of reactions using the dynamical and the statistical models of multifragmentation, and the experimental isoscaling observable, is studied to extract information on the density dependence of the symmetry energy. It is observed that the dynamical and the statistical model calculations give consistent results assuming the sequential decay effect in dynamic…
The density dependence of the symmetry energy in the equation of state of isospin asymmetric nuclear matter is studied using the isoscaling of the fragment yields and the antisymmetrized molecular dynamic calculation. It is observed that the experimental data at low densities are consistent with the form of symmetry energy,E$_{sym}$ $\approx$ 31.6 ($ρ/ρ_{\circ})^{0.69}$, in close agreement with those predicted by the results of variational many-body calculation. A comparison of the present result with those reported recently using the NSCL-MSU data suggests that the heavy ion studies favor a d…
The liquid-gas phase transition in hot asymmetric nuclear matter is investigated within relativistic mean-field model using the density dependence of nuclear symmetry energy constrained from the measured neutron skin thickness of finite nuclei. We find symmetry energy has a significant influence on several features of liquid-gas phase transition. The boundary and area of the liquid-gas coexistence region, the maximal isospin asymmetry and the critical values of pressure and isospin asymmetry all of which systematically increase with increasing softness in the density dependence of symmetry ene…
We study the liquid-gas phase transition of stellar matter with the inclusion of the finite-size effect from surface and Coulomb energies. The equilibrium conditions for two coexisting phases are determined by minimizing the total free energy including the surface and Coulomb contributions, which are different from the Gibbs conditions used in the bulk calculations. The finite-size effect can significantly reduce the region of the liquid-gas mixed phase. The influence of the symmetry energy on the liquid-gas phase transition is investigated with the inclusion of finite-size effects. It is foun…
The liquid-gas phase transition in hot asymmetric nuclear matter is studied within density-dependent relativistic mean-field models where the density dependence is introduced according to the Brown-Rho scaling and constrained by available data at low densities and empirical properties of nuclear matter. The critical temperature of the liquid-gas phase transition is obtained to be 15.7 MeV in symmetric nuclear matter falling on the lower edge of the small experimental error bars. In hot asymmetric matter, the boundary of the phase-coexistence region is found to be sensitive to the density depen…
The properties of critical parameters and phase diagram structure of liquid-gas phase transition are investigated in thermal symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter with the covariant density functional (CDF) theory. Although uncertainty remains in predicting the critical parameters such as the critical temperature and pressure from various CDF functionals, several correlations are explored numerically and verified to be approximately linear between them. These correlations become worse when nuclear matter is more isospin asymmetric, resulting mainly from the effects induced by symmetry energy…
In this work we study the thermodynamic properties of the pion gas starting from the realistic elastic scattering phase-shifts obtained from Chiral Perturbation Theory and using the virial expansion. In particular we study the state equation and the behavior of the quark condensate as a function of the temperature and the density.
We examine critically how tightly the density dependence of nuclear symmetry energy \esym is constrained by the universal equation of state (EOS) of the unitary Fermi gas $E_{\rm{UG}}(ρ)$ considering currently known uncertainties of higher order parameters describing the density dependence of the Equation of State of isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter. We found that $E_{\rm{UG}}(ρ)$ does provide a useful lower boundary for the \esym. However, it does not tightly constrain the correlation between the magnitude $E_{\rm{sym}}(ρ_0)$ and slope $L$ unless the curvature $K_{\rm{sym}}$ of the symmetry …
We have demonstrated that the isospin of nuclei influences the fragment production during the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition. Calculations for Au197, Sn124, La124 and Kr78 at various excitation energies were carried out on the basis of the statistical multifragmentation model (SMM). We analyzed the behavior of the critical exponent tau with the excitation energy and its dependence on the critical temperature. Relative yields of fragments were classified with respect to the mass number of the fragments in the transition region. In this way, we have demonstrated that nuclear multifragmentat…
Various definitions of the symmetry energy are introduced for nuclei, dilute nuclear matter below saturation density and stellar matter, which is found in compact stars or core-collapse supernovae. The resulting differences are exemplified by calculations in a theoretical approach based on a generalized relativistic density functional for dense matter. It contains nucleonic clusters as explicit degrees of freedom with medium dependent properties that are derived for light clusters from a quantum statistical approach. With such a model the dissolution of clusters at high densities can be descri…
We have demonstrated that the isospin of nuclei influences the fragment production during the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition. Calculations for Au197, Sn124, La124 and Kr78 at various excitation energies were carried out on the basis of the statistical multifragmentation model (SMM). We analyzed the behavior of the critical exponent tau with the excitation energy and its dependence on the critical temperature. Relative yields of fragments were classified with respect to the mass number of the fragments in the transition region. In this way, we have demonstrated that nuclear multifragmentat…
The dilute Fermi gas at unitarity is scale invariant and its bulk viscosity vanishes. We compute the leading contribution to the bulk viscosity when the scattering length is not infinite. A measure of scale breaking is provided by the ratio $(P-\frac{2}{3}{\cal E})/P$, where $P$ is the pressure and ${\cal E}$ is the energy density. In the high temperature limit this ratio scales as $\frac{zλ}{a}$, where $z$ is the fugacity, $λ$ is the thermal wave length, and $a$ is the scattering length. We show that the bulk viscosity $ζ$ scales as the second power of this parameter, $ζ\sim (\frac{zλ}{a})^2 …
We investigate the superfluidity and the associated Nambu-Goldstone modes in a three-flavor atomic Fermi gas with SU(3) global symmetry. The s-wave pairing occurs in flavor anti-triplet channel due to the Pauli principle, and the superfluid state contains both gapped and gapless fermionic excitations. Corresponding to the spontaneous breaking of the SU(3) symmetry to a SU(2) symmetry with five broken generators, there are only three Nambu-Goldstone modes, one is with linear dispersion law and two are with quadratic dispersion law. The other two expected Nambu-Goldstone modes become massive wit…
In this Letter, we show that the classical SO(2,1) symmetry of a harmonically trapped Fermi gas in two dimensions is broken by quantum effects. The anomalous correction to the symmetry algebra is given by a two-body operator that is well known as the contact. Taking into account this modification, we are able to derive the virial theorem for the system and a universal relation for the pressure of a homogeneous gas. The existence of an undamped breathing mode is associated with the classical symmetry. We provide an estimate for the anomalous frequency shift of this oscillation at zero temperatu…
Background: The nuclear symmetry energy is a fundamental ingredient in determining the equation of state (EOS) of neutron stars (NS). Recent terrestrial experiments constrain both its value and slope at nuclear saturation density, however, its value at higher densities is unknown. Assuming a Free Fermi-gas (FFG) model for the kinetic symmetry energy, the high-density extrapolation depends on a single parameter, the density dependence of the potential symmetry energy. The Correlated Fermi-gas (CFG) model improves on the FFG model by including the effects of short-range, correlated, high-momentu…
Based on quantum statistical mechanics we show that the $SU(3)$ color singlet ensemble of a quark-gluon gas exhibits a $Z(3)$ symmetry through the normaized character in fundamental representation and also becomes equivalent, within a stationary point approximation, to the ensemble given by Polyakov Loop. Also Polyakov Loop gauge potential is obtained by considering spatial gluons along with the invariant Haar measure at each space point. The probability of the normalized character in $SU(3)$ vis-a-vis Polyakov Loop is found to be maximum at a particular value exhibiting a strong color correla…
The liquid-gas phase transition in hot neutron-rich nuclear matter is investigated within a self-consistent thermal model using an isospin and momentum dependent interaction (MDI) constrained by the isospin diffusion data in heavy-ion collisions, a momentum-independent interaction (MID), and an isoscalar momentum-dependent interaction (eMDYI). The boundary of the phase-coexistence region is shown to be sensitive to the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy with a softer symmetry energy giving a higher critical pressure and a larger area of phase-coexistence region. Compared with th…
A general field-theoretic framework for the treatment of liquid-gas phase transitions is developed. Starting from a fundamental four-dimensional field theory at nonzero temperature and density, an effective three-dimensional field theory with a sign problem is derived. Although charge conjugation $\mathcal{C}$ is broken at finite density, there remains a symmetry under $\mathcal{CK}$, where $\mathcal{K}$ is complex conjugation. We consider four models: relativistic fermions, nonrelativistic fermions, static fermions and classical particles. The thermodynamic behavior is extracted from $\mathca…
We report the continuum limits of the speed of sound, c_s, and the specific heat at constant volume, c_v, in quenched QCD at temperatures of 2Tc and 3Tc. At these temperatures, c_s is within 2-sigma of the ideal gas value, whereas c_v differs significantly from the ideal gas. However, both are compatible with results expected in a theory with conformal symmetry. We investigate effective measures of conformal symmetry in the high temperature phase of QCD.
