Determination of the coexistence curve, critical temperature, density, and pressure of bulk nuclear matter from fragment emission data
J. B. Elliott, P. T. Lake, L. G. Moretto, and L. Phair
Accepted
An analysis of six different sets of experimental data indicates that infinite, neutron-proton symmetric, neutral nuclear matter has a critical temperature of Tc = 17.9 0.4 MeV, a critical density of rc = 0.06 0.01 nucleons/fm3 and a critical pressure of pc = 0.310.07 MeV/fm3. These values have been obtained by analyzing data from six different reactions studied in three different experiments: two "compound nuclear" reactions: 58Ni+12C70Se and 64Ni+12C76Se (both performed at the LBNL 88" Cyclotron) and four "multifragmentation" reactions: 1 GeV/c p+197Au (performed by the ISiS collaboration), 1 GeV/nucleon 197Au+12C, 1 GeV/nucleon 139La+12C and 1 GeV/nucleon 84Kr+12C (all performed by the EOS collaboration). The charge yields of all reactions as a function of excitation energy were fit with a version of Fisher's droplet model modified to account for the dual components of the fluid (i.e. protons and neutrons), Coulomb effects, finite size effects and angular momentum arising from the nuclear collisions.