Hot nuclear matter in an extended Brueckner approach

Abstract

The properties of cold and hot nuclear matter are studied in the frame of the Brueckner theory, extended to finite temperature. The basic task is the evaluation of the two-hole line diagram using the Paris potential supplemented by the introduction of three-body forces, coming from the exchange of π and ρ mesons. The latter have an important saturating effect, but not sufficient to reach correct saturation. The latter is achieved by a phenomenological treatment. The properties of hot nuclear matter, for temperatures around 10 MeV, are investigated. Particular attention is paid to one-body properties. The density and temperature dependence of many quantities, like the single-particle energy spectrum, the optical potential, the effective mass, the non-locality of the single-particle field, the mean free path, is displayed and analyzed. The relative importance of the temperature dependence of the g-matrix and of phase space is investigated, especially in relation with the imaginary part of the optical potential and the mean free path. The temperature dependence of the effective mass is particularly studied. It is shown that the peak due to the so-called core polarization effect disappears rapidly as the matter is heated. The evaluation of the entropy and of the level density parameter a, which are closely related, is discussed, and the failure of the Hartree-Fock approach to reproduce the value of a correctly is explained. Two-body properties are also investigated. The temperature and density dependence of the two-body correlations are displayed. Particular attention is paid to the temperature dependence of the effective interaction. The latter is exhibited in a simple manner. It is shown that the effective force felt by low-energy nucleons does not change by more than a few percent when the temperature goes from 0 to 10 MeV. For high-energy nucleons, the change may be as large as ten percent.