Nuclear liquid-gas phase transition studied with antisymmetrized molecular dynamics

Abstract

The nuclear liquid-gas phase transition of the system in ideal thermal equilibrium is studied with antisymmetrized molecular dynamics. The time evolution of a many-nucleon system confined in a container is solved for a long time to get a microcanonical ensemble of a given energy and volume. The temperature and the pressure are extracted from this ensemble and the caloric curves are constructed. The present work is the first time that a microscopic dynamical model which describes nuclear multifragmentation reactions well is directly applied to get the nuclear caloric curve. The obtained constant pressure caloric curves clearly show the characteristic feature of the liquid-gas phase transition, namely negative heat capacity (backbending), which is expected for the phase transition in finite systems.