Nonextensive nuclear liquid–gas phase transition

Abstract

We study an effective relativistic mean-field model of nuclear matter with arbitrary proton fraction at finite temperature in the framework of nonextensive statistical mechanics, characterized by power-law quantum distributions. We investigate the presence of thermodynamic instability in a warm and asymmetric nuclear medium and study the consequent nuclear liquid–gas phase transition by requiring the Gibbs conditions on the global conservation of baryon number and electric charge fraction. We show that nonextensive statistical effects play a crucial role in the equation of state and in the formation of mixed phase also for small deviations from the standard Boltzmann–Gibbs statistics.