Skewness of nuclear matter and three-particle correlations

Abstract

We present a study of the skewness of nuclear matter, which is proportional to the third derivative of the energy per nucleon with respect to the baryon density at the saturation point, in the framework of the Landau-Migdal theory. We derive an exact relation between the skewness, the nucleon effective mass, and two-particle and three-particle interaction parameters. We also present qualitative estimates, which indicate that three-particle correlations play an important role for the skewness.