Speaker
Xin An
(National Center for Nuclear Research)
Description
We analyze an effective statistical model for nuclear matter based on a virial-type expansion for the internal energy. In the thermodynamic limit, the order parameter satisfies an integrable partial differential equation, whose solution is a family of equations of state unveiling nuclear and quark-hadron phase transitions through gradient catastrophe and shock formation. We further demonstrate that corrections to the critical behavior, accounting for a finite number of particles in the system, are not just non-negligible but also important in heavy-ion-collision experiments.
