Compound nuclear decay and the liquid to vapor phase transition: a physical picture

Abstract

Analyses of multifragmentation in terms of the Fisher droplet model (FDM) and the associated construction of a nuclear phase diagram bring forth the problem of the actual existence of the nuclear vapor phase and the meaning of its associated pressure. We present here a physical picture of fragment production from excited nuclei that solves this problem and establishes the relationship between the FDM and the standard compound nucleus decay rate for rare particles emitted in first-chance decay. The compound thermal emission picture is formally equivalent to a FDM-like equilibrium description and avoids the problem of the vapor while also explaining the observation of Boltzmann-like distribution of emission times. In this picture a simple Fermi gas thermometric relation is naturally justified and verified in the fragment yields and time scales. Low energy compound nucleus fragment yields scale according to the FDM and lead to an estimate of the infinite symmetric nuclear matter critical temperature between 18 and 27 MeV depending on the choice of the surface energy coefficient of nuclear matter.

Five page two column pages, four figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. C

References in corpus (6)

• The liquid to vapor phase transition in excited nuclei
• Critical Behavior in Light Nuclear Systems: Experimental Aspects
• Cnstructing the phase diagram of finite neutral nuclear matter
• The complement: a solution to liquid drop finite size effects in phase transitions
• The three-dimensional Ising model: A paradigm of liquid-vapor coexistence in nuclear multifragmentation
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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Nuclear multifragmentation and phase transition for hot nuclei
• Shear viscosity of a hadronic gas mixture
• QCD Viscosity to Entropy Density Ratio in the Hadronic Phase
• Short timescale behavior of colliding heavy nuclei at intermediate energies
• Analysis of fragment yield ratios in the nuclear phase transition
• Expansion dynamics of Lennard-Jones systems
• Equation of State and Phase Transitions in the Nuclear and Hadronic Systems