Saturation properties and incompressibility of nuclear matter: A consistent determination from nuclear masses.

Abstract

Starting with a two-body effective nucleon-nucleon interaction, it is shown that the infinite nuclear matter model of atomic nuclei is more appropriate than the conventional Bethe-Weizsacker-like mass formulas to extract saturation properties of nuclear matter from nuclear masses. In particular, the saturation density thus obtained agrees with that of electron scattering data and the Hartree-Fock calculations. For the first time using nuclear mass formula, the radius constant ${\mathit{r}}_{0}$=1.138 fm and binding energy per nucleon ${\mathit{a}}_{\mathit{v}}$=-16.11 MeV, corresponding to the infinite nuclear matter, are consistently obtained from the same source. An important off-shoot of this study is the determination of nuclear matter incompressibility ${\mathit{K}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\infty}}}$ to be 288\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}28 MeV using the same source of nuclear masses as input.