Nonextensive Nuclear Liquid-Gas Phase Transition

Abstract

We study an effective relativistic mean-field model of nuclear matter with arbitrary proton fraction at finite temperature in the framework of nonextensive statistical mechanics, characterized by power-law quantum distributions. We investigate the presence of thermodynamic instability in a warm and asymmetric nuclear medium and study the consequent nuclear liquid-gas phase transition by requiring the Gibbs conditions on the global conservation of baryon number and electric charge fraction. We show that nonextensive statistical effects play a crucial role in the equation of state and in the formation of mixed phase also for small deviations from the standard Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics.