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From binding and saturation to criticality in nuclear matter with lattice effective field theory

Osman Agar*

Zhengxue Ren†

Serdar Elhatisari‡

  • *Contact author: osmanagar@kmu.edu.tr
  • †Contact author: zxren@nankai.edu.cn
  • ‡Contact author: selhatisari@gmail.com
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Phys. Rev. C 114, 044007 – Published 26 October, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/zprr-24ht

Abstract

We investigate the interaction dependence of the liquid-gas critical point of symmetric nuclear matter in finite-temperature lattice effective field theory. Building on the pinhole-trace algorithm, we benchmark a first-order perturbative treatment for representative Hamiltonian splittings and then compute the finite-temperature equation of state for a sequence of sign-friendly lattice Hamiltonians ranging from an SU(4)-symmetric interaction to Hamiltonians with physical S01 and S13 channel dependence and three improved leading-order Hamiltonians. The finite-temperature analysis is complemented by zero-temperature calculations of the symmetric-matter saturation point and the binding energies of selected nuclei within the same lattice framework. We find that the benchmarked perturbative strategy is quantitatively reliable in the thermodynamic regime studied. Across this Hamiltonian sequence, the leading order Hamiltonians improve the overall description of finite-nucleus binding energies and move the zero-temperature saturation point toward the empirical region, while lowering the critical temperature from 15.33(6) to 13.50(17)–13.71(19) MeV. These calculations show that finite-temperature criticality is not fixed by zero-temperature saturation and binding alone, and they provide a complementary benchmark for future lattice interaction development.

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Outline

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Phys. Rev. C 114, 044007– Published 26 October, 2026
  • Received 10 May 2026
  • Revised 31 July 2026
  • Accepted 18 September 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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