Origins and Impacts of High-Density Symmetry Energy

Abstract

What is nuclear symmetry energy? Why is it important? What do we know about it? Why is it so uncertain especially at high densities? Can the total symmetry energy or its kinetic part be negative? What are the effects of three-body and/or tensor force on symmetry energy? How can we probe the density dependence of nuclear symmetry energy with terrestrial nuclear experiments? What observables of heavy-ion reactions are sensitive to the high-density behavior of nuclear symmetry energy? How does the symmetry energy affect properties of neutron stars, gravitational waves and our understanding about the nature of strong-field gravity? In this lecture, we try to answer these questions as best as we can based on some of our recent work and/or understanding of research done by others. This note summarizes the main points of the lecture.

Invited lecture given at the Carpathian Summer School of Physics 2016, Exotic Nuclei and Nuclear Astrophysics (VI), Sinaia, Romania, June 26 to July 9, 2016

References in corpus (24)

• Chiral effective field theory and nuclear forces
• Relativistic Mean-Field Hadronic Models under Nuclear Matter Constraints
• Probing Cold Dense Nuclear Matter
• Constraints on neutron star radii based on chiral effective field theory interactions
• Momentum sharing in imbalanced Fermi systems
• Results of the ASY-EOS experiment at GSI: The symmetry energy at suprasaturation density
• Constraints on the Symmetry Energy Using the Mass-Radius Relation of Neutron Stars
• Symmetry energy from elliptic flow in 197Au + 197Au
• Nuclear symmetry energy and its density slope at normal density extracted from global nucleon optical potentials
• Symmetry Energy of Nucleonic Matter With Tensor Correlations
• Critical Density and Impact of $\Delta (1232)$ Resonance Formation in Neutron Stars
• Half-Skyrmions, Tensor Forces and Symmetry Energy in Cold Dense Matter
• Density-dependent nucleon-nucleon interaction from three-nucleon forces
• Effects of short-range correlation reduced kinetic symmetry energy in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies
• Constraints on the symmetry energy from observational probes of the neutron star crust
• Three-body force effect on nucleon momentum distributions in asymmetric nuclear matter within the framework of the extended BHF approach
• Impact of the equation-of-state -- gravity degeneracy on constraining the nuclear symmetry energy from astrophysical observables
• The isospin quartic term in the kinetic energy of neutron-rich nucleonic matter
• Nuclear symmetry potential in the relativistic impulse approximation
• Short-range correlations in isospin symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter: a microscopic perspective
• Low-momentum interactions with Brown-Rho-Ericson scalings and the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy
• Tensor force induced isospin-dependence of short-range nucleon-nucleon correlation and high-density behavior of nuclear symmetry energy
• Analysis of Neutron Stars Observations Using a Correlated Fermi Gas Model
• Nuclear constraints on gravitational waves from deformed pulsars