A new Fermionic Molecular Dynamics (FMD) model based on a Skyrme functional is proposed in this paper. After introducing the basic formalism, some first applications to nuclear structure and nuclear thermodynamics are presented
The nuclear Equation of State (EoS) lies in the center of the nuclear N-body problem as it describes the properties of the Nuclear Matter (NM) and determines the parameters of the nuclear interaction. In this work, we propose a theoretical description of the EoS of both Symmetric (SNM) and Asymmetric (ANM) nuclear matter within the framework of Fermionic Dynamics. With this description we produce several new semi-hard EoS with density dependent effective mass. Finally, we transform the aforementioned theory in order to be consistent with Mean-Field dynamics. We use this approach to accurately …
The time evolution of excited nuclei, which are in equilibrium with the surrounding vapour, is investigated. It is shown that the finite nuclear systems undergo a first oder phase transition. The caloric curve is presented for excited Oxygen, Magnesium, Aluminum and Calcium and the critical temperature is estimated for Oxygen.
Violent nuclear collisions are open systems which require a non-equilibrium description when the process should be followed from the first instants. The heated system produced in the collision, can no more be treated within an independent-particle picture and additional correlations should be taken into account: they rely to in-medium dissipation and phase-space fluctuations. Their interplay with the one-body collective behaviour activates the transport dynamics: large-amplitude fluctuations and bifurcations in a variety of mechanisms appear, from fusion to neck formation till eventually freez…
Clustering plays an important role in the structure of nuclei, especially for light nuclei in the $p$-shell. In nuclear cluster models these degrees of freedom are introduced explicitly. In the Resonating Group Method or in the Generator Coordinate Method the clusters are built from individual nucleons interacting via an effective nucleon-nucleon interaction; the total wave function is antisymmetrized. Fermionic Molecular Dynamics (FMD) goes beyond pure cluster models. It is a microscopic many-body approach using a Gaussian wave packet basis that includes the harmonic oscillator shell model an…
A self-consistent approach based on finite temperature Green's functions is used to investigate thermodynamic properties of nuclear matter. The internal energy is derived from the diagrams associated to the interaction energy. Pressure and entropy up to T=20 MeV are obtained from the generating functional form of the thermodynamic potential.
According to standard textbooks, the nuclear symmetry energy originates from the {\it kinetic} energy and the {\it interaction} itself. We argue that this view requires certain modifications. We ascribe the physical origin of the {\it kinetic} term to the discreteness of fermionic levels of, in principle arbitrary binary fermionic systems, and relate its mean value directly to the average level density. Physically it connects this part also to the isoscalar part of the interaction which, at least in self-bound systems like atomic nuclei, decides upon the spatial dimensions of the system. For t…
Transfer reactions constitute a stringent test for nuclear supersymmetry, a theory that simultaneously describes neighboring nuclei with bosonic and fermionic character. We construct and analytically evaluate one-nucleon transfer matrix elements between supersymmetric partners with the U(6/4) case as an example, and stress the need for a careful treatment of bosonic and fermionic operators in the construction of mixed tensor operators.
The consequences of the attractive, short-range nucleon-nucleon (NN) interaction on the wave functions of the Elliott SU(3) and the proxy-SU(3) symmetry are discussed. The NN interaction favors the most symmetric spatial SU(3) irreducible representation, which corresponds to the maximal spatial overlap among the fermions. The percentage of the symmetric components out of the total in an SU(3) wave function is introduced, through which it is found, that no SU(3) irrep is more symmetric than the highest weight irrep for a certain number of valence particles in a three dimensional, isotropic, har…
The nuclear thermodynamic observables like the temperature, volume and the specific heat as obtained from isotopic ratios in hot disassembled nuclear matter are examined in the light of the S-matrix approach to the nuclear equation of state. The values of the observables, as extracted without inclusion of scattering effects are found to be modified appreciably in some cases when scattering between the fragment species is taken care of.
We investigate the relation between the binding energy and the Fermi energy and between different expressions for the pressure in cold nuclear matter. For a self-consistent calculation based on a $Φ$ derivable $T-$matrix approximation with off-shell propagators the thermodynamic relations are well satisfied unlike for a $G-$matrix or a $T-$matrix approach using quasi-particle propagators in the ladder diagrams.
Both simple and sophisticated models are frequently used in an attempt to understand how real nuclei breakup when subjected to large excitation energies, a process known as nuclear multifragmentation. Many of these models assume equilibriumthermodynamics and produce results often interpreted as evidence of a phase transition. This work examines one class of models and employs standard thermodynamical procedure to explore the possible existence and nature of a phase transition. The role of various terms, e.g. Coulomb and surface energy, is discussed.
The density and temperature dependence of the nuclear symmetry free energy is investigated using microscopic two- and three-body nuclear potentials constructed from chiral effective field theory. The nuclear force models and many-body methods are benchmarked to properties of isospin-symmetric nuclear matter in the vicinity of the saturation density as well as the virial expansion of the neutron matter equation of state at low fugacities. The free energy per particle of isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter is calculated assuming a quadratic dependence of the interaction contributions on the isospi…
We investigate the thermodynamic equation of state of isospin-symmetric nuclear matter with microscopic nuclear forces derived within the framework of chiral effective field theory. Two- and three-body nuclear interactions constructed at low resolution scales form the basis for a perturbative calculation of the finite-temperature equation of state. The nuclear force models and many-body methods are benchmarked against bulk properties of isospin-symmetric nuclear matter at zero temperature, which are found to be well reproduced when chiral nuclear interactions constructed at the lowest resoluti…
We calculate thermodynamic quantities in symmetric nuclear matter within the self-consistent Green's functions method including three-body forces. The thermodynamic potential is computed directly from a diagrammatic expansion, implemented with the CD-Bonn and Nijmegen nucleon-nucleon potentials and the Urbana three-body forces. We present results for entropy and pressure up to temperatures of 20 MeV and densities of 0.32 fm^-3. While the pressure is sensitive to the inclusion of three-body forces, the entropy is not. The unstable spinodal region is identified and the critical temperature assoc…
The temperature dependence of the chiral condensate in isospin-symmetric nuclear matter at varying baryon density is investigated using thermal in-medium chiral effective field theory. This framework provides a realistic approach to the thermodynamics of the correlated nuclear many-body system and permits calculating systematically the pion-mass dependence of the free energy per particle. One- and two-pion exchange processes, $Δ(1232)$-isobar excitations, Pauli blocking corrections and three-body correlations are treated up to and including three loops in the expansion of the free energy densi…
We explore the use of mean field models to approximate microscopic nuclear equations of state derived from chiral effective field theory across the densities and temperatures relevant for simu- lating astrophysical phenomena such as core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers. We consider both relativistic mean field theory with scalar and vector meson exchange as well as energy density functionals based on Skyrme phenomenology and compare to thermodynamic equa- tions of state derived from chiral two- and three-nucleon forces in many-body perturbation theory. Quantum Monte Carlo s…
The computation of the thermodynamic properties of nuclear matter is a central task of theoretical nuclear physics. The nuclear equation of state is an essential quantity in nuclear astrophysics and governs the properties of neutron stars and core-collapse supernovæ. The framework of chiral effective field theory provides the basis for the description of nuclear interactions in terms of a systematic low-energy expansion. In this thesis, we apply chiral two- and three-nucleon interactions in perturbative many-body calculations of the thermodynamic equation of state of infinite homogeneous nucle…
Within Fermionic Molecular Dynamics (FMD) a quantal nuclear system with only 16 nucleons shows a clearly visible liquid-gas phase transition. The FMD model is an approximation to the many-body problem which describes the system by antisymmetrized many-body states in which each nucleon is occupying a Gaussian shaped time-dependent wave-packet. The statistical ensemble is obtained by time averaging.
The thermal evolution of a few thermodynamic properties of the nuclear surface like its thermodynamic potential energy, entropy and the symmetry free energy are examined for both semi-infinite nuclear matter and finite nuclei. The Thomas-Fermi model is employed. Three Skyrme interactions, namely, SkM$^*$, SLy4 and SK255 are used for the calculations to gauge the dependence of the nuclear surface properties on the energy density functionals. For finite nuclei, the surface observables are computed from a global liquid-drop inspired fit of the energies and free energies of a host of nuclei coveri…
Properties of nuclear and neutron matter are discussed in a nonlinear $σ$-$ω$-$ρ$ mean-field approximation with self-interactions and mixing-interactions of mesons and baryons. The nonlinear interactions are renormalized by employing the theory of conserving approximations, which results in a thermodynamically consistent approximation that maintains Hugenholtz-Van Hove theorem and Landau's requirement of quasiparticles. The approximation is equivalent to the Hartree approximation with {\it effective masses} and {\it effective coupling constants} of baryons and mesons. The effective masses and …
The dynamics of fermionic many-body systems is investigated in the framework of Boltzmann-Langevin (BL) stochastic one-body approaches. Within the recently introduced BLOB model, we examine the interplay between mean-field effects and two-body correlations, of stochastic nature, for nuclear matter at moderate temperature and in several density conditions, corresponding to stable or mechanically unstable situations. Numerical results are compared to analytic expectations for the fluctuation amplitude of isoscalar and isovector densities, probing the link to the properties of the employed effect…
We explore the presence of thermodynamic instabilities and, con\-se\-quen\-tly, the realization of a pure hadronic phase transition in the hot and finite baryon density nuclear matter. The analysis is performed by means of an effective relativistic mean-field model with the inclusion of hyperons, $Δ$-isobars, and the lightest pseudoscalar and vector meson degrees of freedom. The Gibbs conditions on the global conservation of baryon number and zero net strangeness in symmetric nuclear matter are required. Similarly to the liquid-gas phase transition, we show that a phase transition, characteriz…
A full implementation of the Boltzmann-Langevin equation for fermionic systems is introduced in a transport model for dissipative collisions among heavy nuclei. Fluctuations are injected in phase space and not, like in more conventional approaches, as a projection on suitable subspaces. The advantage of this model is to be specifically adapted to describe processes characterised by instabilities, like the formation of fragments from a hot nuclear system, and by dissipation, like the transparency in nucleus-nucleus collisions.
The free energy and the equation of state of isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter are calculated at finite temperature up to three loop order in the framework of in-medium chiral perturbation theory, systematically incorporating one- and two-pion exchange dynamics to this order. Effects from the two-pion exchange with explicit Δ-isobar excitation are included, as well as three-body forces. We construct the phase diagram of nuclear matter for different proton fractions x_p and investigate the dependence of nuclear matter properties on the isospin-asymmetry. A detailed study of the liquid-gas phase…
Sequences of experimental ground-state energies for both odd and even $A$ are mapped onto concave patterns cured from convexities due to pairing and/or shell effects. The same patterns, completed by a list of excitation energies, give numerical estimates of the grand potential $Ω(β,μ)$ for a mixture of nuclei at low or moderate temperatures $T=β^{-1}$ and at many chemical potentials $μ.$ The average nucleon number $<{\bf A} >(β,μ)$ then becomes a continuous variable, allowing extrapolations towards nuclear masses closer to drip lines. We study the possible concavity of several thermodynamical …
This presentation reviews an approach to nuclear many-body systems based on the spontaneously broken chiral symmetry of low-energy QCD. In the low-energy limit, for energies and momenta small compared to a characteristic symmetry breaking scale of order 1 GeV, QCD is realized as an effective field theory of Goldstone bosons (pions) coupled to heavy fermionic sources (nucleons). Nuclear forces at long and intermediate distance scales result from a systematic hierarchy of one- and two-pion exchange processes in combination with Pauli blocking effects in the nuclear medium. Short distance dynamic…
The behaviour of a di-nuclear system in the regime of strong pairing correlations is studied with the methods of statistical mechanics. It is shown that the thermal averaging is strong enough to assure the application of thermodynamical methods to the energy exchange between the two nuclei in contact. In particular, thermal averaging justifies the definition of a nuclear temperature.
We calculate the equation of state of nuclear matter for arbitrary isospin-asymmetry up to three loop order in the free energy density in the framework of in-medium chiral perturbation theory. In our approach 1π- and 2π-exchange dynamics with the inclusion of the Δ-isobar excitation as an explicit degree of freedom, corresponding to the long- and intermediate-range correlations, are treated explicitly. Few contact terms fixed to reproduce selected known properties of nuclear matter encode the short-distance physics. Two-body as well as three-body forces are systematically included. We find a c…
We propose a Constraint Molecular Dynamics model for Fermionic system. In this approach the equations of motion of wave packets for the nuclear many-body problem are solved by imposing that the one-body occupation probability $\bar{f}(r,p,t)$ can assume only values less or equal to 1. This condition reflects the Fermionic nature of the studied systems and it is implemented with a fast algorithm which allows also the study of the heaviest colliding system. The parameters of the model have been chosen to reproduce the average binding energy and radii of nuclei in the mass region $A=30\sim 208$. …
We investigate the Bose-Einstein condensation of fermionic pairs in three different superfluid systems: ultracold and dilute atomic gases, bulk neutron matter, and neutron stars. In the case of dilute gases made of fermionic atoms the average distance between atoms is much larger than the effective radius of the inter-atomic potential. Here the condensation of fermionic pairs is analyzed as a function of the s-wave scattering length, which can be tuned in experiments by using the technique of Feshbach resonances from a small and negative value (corresponding to the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (B…
We investigate the occurrence of bifurcations in the dynamical trajectories depicting central nuclear collisions at Fermi energies. The quantitative description of the reaction dynamics is obtained within a new transport model, based on the solution of the Boltzmann-Langevin equation in three dimensions, with a broad applicability for dissipative fermionic dynamics. Dilute systems formed in central collisions are shown to fluctuate between two energetically favourable mechanisms: reverting to a compact shape or rather disintegrating into several fragments. The latter result can be connected to…
The BCS-BEC crossover and phase diagram for asymmetric nuclear superfluid with pairings in isospin I = 0 and I = 1 channels are investigated at mean field level, by using a density dependent nucleon-nucleon potential. Induced by the in-medium nucleon mass and density dependent coupling constants, neutron-proton Cooper pairs could be in BEC state at sufficiently low density, but there is no chance for the BEC formation of neutron-neutron and proton-proton pairs at any density and asymmetry. We calculate the phase diagram in asymmetry-temperature plane for weakly interacting nuclear superfluid, …
The temperature dependence of the chiral condensate in isospin-symmetric nuclear matter at varying baryon densities is investigated starting from a realistic free energy density of the correlated nuclear many-body system. The framework is thermal in-medium chiral effective field theory which permits a systematic calculation of the quark mass dependence of the free energy density. One- and two-pion exchange processes, virtual $Δ(1232)$-isobar excitations and Pauli blocking corrections are treated up to and including three-loop order. It is found that nuclear matter remains in the Nambu-Goldston…
We develop a model in the framework of nuclear fragmentation at thermodynamic equilibrium which can be mapped onto an Ising model with constant magnetization. We work out the thermodynamic properties of the model as well as the properties of the fragment size distributions. We show that two types of phase transitions can be found for high density systems. They merge into a unique transition at low density. An analysis of the critical exponents which characterize observables for different densities in the thermodynamic limit shows that these transitions look like continuous second order transit…
Equilibrium statistics of finite Hamiltonian systems is fundamentally described by the microcanonical ensemble (ME). Canonical, or grand-canonical partition functions are deduced from this by Laplace transform. Only in the thermodynamic limit are they equivalent to ME for homogeneous systems. Therefore ME is the only ensemble for non-extensive/inhomogeneous systems like nuclei or stars where the $\lim_{N\to \infty,ρ=N/V=const}$ does not exist. Conventional canonical thermo-statistic is inapplicable for non-extensive systems. This has far reaching fundamental and quite counter-intuitive consequ…
The strictly reversible, thermodynamically equilibrium nature of the free rotation of a body makes it possible to obtain a number of bounds on the rotational characteristics within individual rotational bands of nonspherical nuclei. As a result, the bounds between which the possible values of the critical spin $J_c$ lie can be expressed exclusively in terms of a restricted number of the experimentally most accessible data on the lower phase $J<J_c$ for a given nuclide. The bounds are tested on the ground-state rotational bands (yrast lines) of even-even nuclei, in which the corresponding phase…
An exact analytical solution of the statistical multifragmentation model is found in thermodynamic limit. The model exhibits a 1-st order phase transition of the liquid-gas type. The mixed phase region of the phase diagram, where the gas of nuclear fragments coexists with the infinite liquid condensate, is unambiguously identified. The peculiar thermodynamic properties of the model near the boundary between the mixed phase and the pure gaseous phase are studied. The results for the caloric curve and specific heat are presented and a physical picture of the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition i…
We study the neutron-proton pairing in nuclear matter as a function of isospin asymmetry at finite temperatures and the saturation density using realistic nuclear forces and Brueckner-renormalized single particle spectra. Our computation of the thermodynamic quantities shows that while the difference of the entropies of the superconducting and normal phases anomalously changes its sign as a function of temperature for arbitrary asymmetry, the grand canonical potential does not; the superconducting state is found to be stable in the whole temperature-asymmetry plane. The pairing gap completely …
Nuclear thermodynamics studies evidenced the existence of a first order phase transition, namely of the liquid-gas type, without paying attention to the isospin degree of freedom. On the other hand, only few results with the introduction of the isospin variable have been so far obtained. Moreover above all a key question remains. It concerns the origin of the dynamics of the phase transition: spinodal instabilities or not with possible consequences and new signatures related to the introduction of the isospin variable.
The dynamical description of correlated nuclear motion is based on a set of coupled equations of motion for the one-body density matrix $ρ(11';t)$ and the two-body correlation function $c_2(12,1'2';t)$, which is obtained from the density-matrix hierarchy beyond conventional mean-field approaches by truncating 3-body correlations. The resulting equations nonperturbatively describe particle-particle collisions (short-range correlations) as well as particle-hole interactions (long-range correlations). Within a basis of time-dependent Hartree-Fock states these equations of motion are solved for co…
We study symmetric nuclear matter at finite temperature, with particular emphasis on the liquid-gas phase transition. We use a standard covariance analysis to propagate statistical uncertainties from the density functional to the thermodynamic properties. We use four functionals with known covariance matrices to obtain as wide a set of results as possible. Our findings suggest that thermodynamical properties are very well constrained by fitting data at zero temperature. The propagated statistical errors in the liquid-gas phase transition parameters are relatively small.
A fermionic description of dark matter using analogies with nuclear physics is developed. At tree level, scalar and vector processes are considered and the two-body potential are explicitly calculated using the Breit approximation. We show that the total cross sections in both cases exhibit Sommerfeld enhancement.
We describe a finite inhomogeneous three dimensional system of classical particles which interact through short and (or) long range interactions by means of a simple analytic spin model. The thermodynamic properties of the system are worked out in the framework of the grand canonical ensemble. It is shown that the system experiences a phase transition at fixed average density in the thermodynamic limit. The phase diagram and the caloric curve are constructed and compared with numerical simulations. The implications of our results concerning the caloric curve are discussed in connection with th…
We study thermodynamics of nuclear matter in a two-flavored parity doublet model within the mean field approximation. Parameters of the model are chosen to reproduce correctly the properties of the nuclear ground state. The model predicts two phase transitions in nuclear matter, a liquid-gas phase transition at normal nuclear density and a chiral transition at higher density. At finite temperature the pion decay constant exhibits a considerable reduction at intermediate values of chemical potential, which is traced back to the presence of the liquid-gas transition, and approaches zero at highe…
We investigate the quartet correlations in four-component fermionic systems at the thermodynamic limit within a variational many-body theory. The Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS)-type variational wave function is extended to the systems with the coexistence of pair and quartet correlations at zero temperature. Special attention is paid to the application of the present framework to an alpha-particle condensation in symmetric nuclear matter, where the coexistence of deuteron and alpha condensations is anticipated. We also discuss how physical properties, such as quasiparticle dispersion, can be …
We have used a realistic nuclear potential, AV18, and a many body technique, the lowest order constraint variational (LOCV) approach, to calculate the properties of hot magnetized nuclear matter. By investigating the free energy, spin polarization parameter, and symmetry energy, we have studied the temperature and magnetic field dependence of the saturation properties of magnetized nuclear matter. In addition, we have calculated the equation of state of magnetized nuclear matter at different temperatures and magnetic fields. It was found that the flashing temperature of nuclear matter decrease…
We propose a new Monte Carlo method called the pinhole trace algorithm for {\it ab initio} calculations of the thermodynamics of nuclear systems. For typical simulations of interest, the computational speedup relative to conventional grand-canonical ensemble calculations can be as large as a factor of one thousand. Using a leading-order effective interaction that reproduces the properties of many atomic nuclei and neutron matter to a few percent accuracy, we determine the location of the critical point and the liquid-vapor coexistence line for symmetric nuclear matter with equal numbers of pro…
We study the fermionic Matsubara Green functions in medium-mass nuclei at finite temperature. The single-fermion Dyson equation with the dynamical kernel of the particle-vibration-coupling (PVC) origin is formulated and solved in the basis of Dirac spinors, which minimize the grand canonical potential with the meson-nucleon covariant energy density functional. The PVC correlations beyond mean field are taken into account in the leading approximation for the energy-dependent self-energy, and the full solution of the finite-temperature Dyson equation is obtained for the fermionic propagators. Wi…
Response functions in nuclear matter at finite temperature are considered beyond the usual Hartree-Fock (HF) plus Random Phase Approximation (RPA) scheme. The contributions due to the propagator for the dressed nucleons and the corresponding vertex corrections are treated in a consistent way. For that purpose a semi-realistic Hamiltonian is developed with parameters adjusted to reproduce the nucleon self-energy as derived from realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions. For a scalar residual interaction the resulting response functions are very close to the RPA response functions. However, the col…
An exact analytical solution of the statistical multifragmentation model is found in thermodynamic limit. The system of nuclear fragments exhibits a 1-st order liquid-gas phase transition. The peculiar thermodynamic properties of the model near the boundary between the mixed phase and the pure gaseous phase are studied.
We show that the {\it ab initio} calculations of nuclear thermodynamics can be performed efficiently using lattice effective field theory. The simulations use a new approach called the pinhole trace algorithm to calculate thermodynamic observables for a fixed number of protons and neutrons enclosed in a finite box. In this framework, we calculate the equation of state, the liquid-vapor coexistence line and the critical point of neutral symmetric nuclear matter with high precision. Since the algorithm uses a canonical ensemble with a fixed number of particles, it provides a sizable computationa…
We study the thermodynamics of helium at densities relevant for white dwarf physics. We find evidence that, as the temperature is increased, there is first a first order transition between two superconducting phases followed by a second order transition to the normal state. These transitions occur, for realistic densities, at temperatures below the crystallization temperature and the crystalline state is likely to remain as the true ground state of the system. The calculations are performed with a screening but non-dynamical electron background and we comment on the impact of this and other ap…
Equilibrium phase diagrams for neutron star matter at subnuclear densities are obtained at zero temperature. Spherical, rod-like and slab-like nuclei as well as spherical and rod-like nuclear bubbles are taken into account by using a compressible liquid-drop model. This model is designed to incorporate uncertainties in the nuclear surface tension and in the proton chemical potential in a gas of dripped neutrons. The resultant phase diagrams show that for typical values of these quantities, the phases with rod-like nuclei and with slab-like nuclei occur in the form of Coulomb lattice at densiti…