Low density instability in relativistic mean field models

Abstract

The effects of the symmetry energy softening of the relativistic mean field (RMF) models on the properties of matter with neutrino trapping are investigated. It is found that the effects are less significant than those in the case without neutrino trapping. The weak dependence of the equation of state on the symmetry energy is shown as the main reason of this finding. Using different RMF models the dynamical instabilities of uniform matters, with and without neutrino trapping, have been also studied. The interplay between the dominant contribution of the variation of matter composition and the role of effective masses of mesons and nucleons leads to higher critical densities for matter with neutrino trapping. Furthermore, the predicted critical density is insensitive to the number of trapped neutrinos as well as to the RMF model used in the investigation. It is also found that additional nonlinear terms in the Horowitz-Piekarewicz and Furnstahl-Serot-Tang models prevent another kind of instability, which occurs at relatively high densities. The reason is that the effective sigma meson mass in their models increases as a function of the matter density.