Abstract
We investigate the role of the Coulomb interaction on the liquid-gas phase transition of nuclear matter with three different values of proton fraction (, and 0.1), relevant for heavy-ion physics as well as various astrophysical scenarios, within the framework of quantum molecular dynamics. We perform simulations for a wide range of density and temperature with and without the Coulomb interaction and calculate the two-point correlation functions of nucleon density fluctuations for all the configurations to determine the phase transition region. We also determine the critical end point of the liquid-gas phase transition for all three values of proton fraction considered. We observe that the Coulomb interaction reduces the transition temperature by MeV for nuclear matter with and and by MeV for nuclear matter with . However, the critical density is found to be more or less insensitive to the Coulomb interaction.
3 More- Received 19 December 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.95.065801
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