Thermodynamics of isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter from chiral effective field theory

Understand

The density and temperature dependence of the nuclear symmetry free energy is investigated using microscopic two- and three-body nuclear potentials constructed from chiral effective field theory.

• The nuclear force models and many-body methods are benchmarked to properties of isospin-symmetric nuclear matter in the vicinity of the saturation density as well as the virial expansion of the neutron matter equation of state at low fugacities.
• The free energy per particle of isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter is calculated assuming a quadratic dependence of the interaction contributions on the isospin asymmetry.
• The spinodal instability at subnuclear densities is examined in detail.