Comments on the nuclear symmetry energy

Abstract

According to standard textbooks, the nuclear symmetry energy originates from the {\it kinetic} energy and the {\it interaction} itself. We argue that this view requires certain modifications. We ascribe the physical origin of the {\it kinetic} term to the discreteness of fermionic levels of, in principle arbitrary binary fermionic systems, and relate its mean value directly to the average level density. Physically it connects this part also to the isoscalar part of the interaction which, at least in self-bound systems like atomic nuclei, decides upon the spatial dimensions of the system. For the general case of binary fermionic systems possible external confining potentials as well as specific boundary conditions will contribute to this part. The reliability of this concept is tested using self-consistent Skyrme Hartree-Fock calculations.

11 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Mass Number Dependence of Nuclear Pairing

Cited by in corpus (14)

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• High-spin intruder states in the fp shell nuclei and isoscalar proton-neutron correlations
• Nuclear Symmetry Energy in Relativistic Mean Field Theory
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• Mass number dependence of the Skyrme-force-induced nuclear symmetry energy