Speaker
Description
A quantitative description of the properties of hot nuclear matter will be needed for the interpretation of the available and forthcoming astrophysical data, providing information on the post merger phase of neutron star coalescence. We have employed a recently developed theoretical model, based on a phenomenological nuclear Hamiltonian, to study the temperature dependence of several nuclear matter properties relevant to astrophysical applications, including the symmetry energy and the nucleon effective masses. The dynamics is described by an effective nucleon-nucleon interaction obtained through the correlated basis functions formalism and the cluster expansion technique. Thermodynamic consistency at finite temperature is obtained by exploiting a variational principle. The possibility to represent the results of microscopic calculations using a simple, and yet physically motivated, parametrisation of thermal effects, suitable for use in simulations of astrophysical processes, is also discussed.
