Liquid-gas phase transition in nuclear matter: Mean-field and beyond

Abstract

The liquid-gas phase transition in nuclear systems is a unique phenomenon, at the frontier of nuclear, many-body and statistical physics. We study this phase transition theoretically at the Hartree-Fock level and explore the available parameter space for the critical point by using several mean-field parametrizations. We find the latent heat of the transition and describe its temperature dependence from first principles. Using tools from many-body physics, we also describe the phase transition beyond the mean-field approximation and find a marked dependence on both the microscopic interaction and the many-body approximation scheme.