2023/05/24 by Z. X. Ren, Serdar Elhatisari, Ren, Zhengxue +7 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #Nuclear physics research studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.15037
openalex publication_date 2023/05/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We present a systematic ab initio study of clustering in hot dilute nuclear matter using nuclear lattice effective field theory with an SU(4)-symmetric interaction. We introduce a method called light-cluster distillation to determine the abundances of dimers, trimers, and alpha clusters as a function of density and temperature. Our lattice results are compared with an ideal gas model composed of free nucleons and clusters. Excellent agreement is found at very low density, while deviations from ideal gas abundances appear at increasing density due to cluster-nucleon and cluster-cluster interactions. In addition to determining the composition of hot dilute nuclear matter as a function of density and temperature, the lattice calculations also serve as benchmarks for virial expansion calculations, statistical models, and transport models of fragmentation and clustering in nucleus-nucleus collisions.