English

Probing nuclear liquid-gas phase transition with isospin correlations

Nuclear Theory 2025-08-06 v2 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We investigate the fluctuations of the net-baryon number near the critical point of the liquid-gas phase transition. We use the parity doublet model in the mean-field approximation fixed to the zero-temperature properties of nuclear matter to account for critical behavior. We explicitly calculate the fluctuations of the net-proton and net-neutron numbers as well as their correlations in the isospin-symmetric matter. We focus on the qualitative properties and systematics of the first- to fourth-order susceptibilities and their ratios. We demonstrate that the fluctuations of net-proton number do not reflect the total net-baryon number fluctuations in the vicinity of the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition. We also study the behavior of the baryon and proton number factorial cumulants. We highlight the importance of the non-trivial correlations between protons and neutrons.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2410.21746,
  title  = {Probing nuclear liquid-gas phase transition with isospin correlations},
  author = {Michał Marczenko and Krzysztof Redlich and Chihiro Sasaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.21746},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Section on factorial cumulants added; matches publised version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:39:11.569Z