Comment on "Negative heat capacities and first order phase transitions in nuclei" by L.G. Moretto et al

Abstract

In a recent paper L.G. Moretto et al [nucl-th/0208024] claim that the negative heat capacities presented in our previously published paper \cite{PRL2000} are "artifacts" coming from the use of periodic boundary conditions in the Lattice-Gas calculations. We stress in this comment that this claim is wrong: in ref. \cite{PRL2000} we did not use periodic boundary conditions and anyhow the boundary conditions are irrelevant for the statistical ensemble used in \cite{PRL2000}. The second claim of [nucl-th/0208024] is that, because of the Coulomb repulsion, systems "with A>60 should present no anomalous negative heat capacities". We show that this conclusion is contradicted by exact Lattice-gas simulations including Coulomb forces which present negative heat capacities even for A>200.