The nuclear matter phase diagram, multifragmentation, Zipf's law

Abstract

Some of the progress in determining the phase boundaries of the nuclear phase diagram, the location of the critical point of the nuclear fragmentation phase transition, and the values of the critical exponents of this transition is reviewed. The recently postulated connection of the size of the largest fragments as a function of their rank with Zipf's law known from linguistics is discussed, and an exact formula is derived. We show that Zipf's law is not strictly observed in nuclear fragmentation, but that one can derive useful approximations.