Microscopic predictions of the nuclear matter liquid-gas phase transition

Abstract

We present first-principles predictions for the liquid-gas phase transition in symmetric nuclear matter employing both two- and three-nucleon chiral interactions. Our discussion focuses on the sources of systematic errors in microscopic quantum many-body predictions. On the one hand, we test uncertainties of our results arising from changes in the construction of chiral Hamiltonians. We use five different chiral forces with consistently derived three-nucleon interactions. On the other hand, we compare the ladder resummation in the self-consistent Green's functions approach to finiteerature Brueckner-Hartree-Fock calculations. We find that systematics due to Hamiltonians dominate over many-body uncertainties. Based on this wide pool of calculations, we estimate that the critical temperature is Tc=16±2 MeV, in reasonable agreement with experimental results. We also find that there is a strong correlation between the critical temperature and the saturation energy in microscopic many-body simulations.