dr Stefan Typel (Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GSI mbH, Darmstadt)

Clusters in Nuclear Matter and Equation of State

Correlations are an essential feature of interacting many-body systems such as nuclear matter. They have an impact on the thermodynamical properties and on the composition since new particle species can be formed as bound states of the onstituents. This aspect and the knowledge of the equation of state is important for the application in the theoretical simulation of astrophysical phenomena like core-collapse supernovae. In this talk, a generalized relativistic mean-field (RMF) approach will be introduced that considers light nuclei up to the alpha particle as additional degrees of freedom and includes two-body scattering correlations in an effective way. The model is compared to the virial equation of state that is the model-independent low-density benchmark. Consistency relations between the RMF meson couplings and the scattering lengths are derived. The model successfully describes the formation and dissolution of light clusters in dense matter. It is also applied to neutron matter and compared to other approaches. An extension of the model to include heavy nuclei is proposed that requires in a first step to calculate the change of their bindung energies in dense matter.