Investigation of the effect of temperature on binding energy of nuclei

Abstract

Within the Strutinsky renormalization procedure temperature dependence of binding energies of nuclei has been observed, where the binding energy comprises of the macroscopic and microscopic part i.e. the liquid drop energy VLDM and the shell correction (δU), respectively. It is observed that δU (particularly at energies ≤ 1.5 MeV) along with the VLDM plays a crucial role to give proper understanding of the nuclear reaction dynamics at the given temperatures of the composite nuclei formed in the low energy heavy ion collisions, within the dynamical cluster decay model of Gupta and Collaborators. We observe that effect of temperature on various binding energy terms of the formula is varied at different temperatures (0 - 4 MeV). This variation is guided by the temperature dependence of various energy coefficients obtained by Davidson et. al., which eventually affects the binding energy per nucleon (B.E./A) curve quite significantly. We find that values of B.E./A show consistent increasing trend up to T = 1 MeV, attributing it to the peculiar behavior of the surface energy term, and for higher temperature (say 2 - 4 MeV), it is showing downward trend particularly for nuclei with A ∼ 10-150. While for heavier nuclei, the values of B.E./A start increasing beyond T = 2 MeV, due to the asymmetry energy term.