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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Constraints on the symmetry energy from PREX-II in the multimessenger era

Tong-Gang Yue1, Lie-Wen Chen1,*, Zhen Zhang2, and Ying Zhou3

  • 1School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, and Key Laboratory for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (MOE), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
  • 2Sino-French Institute of Nuclear Engineering and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai 519082, China
  • 3Quantum Machine Learning Laboratory, Shadow Creator Inc., Shanghai 201208, China

  • *Corresponding author: lwchen@sjtu.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. Research 4, L022054 – Published 8 June, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.4.L022054

Abstract

The neutron skin thickness Δrnp of heavy nuclei is essentially determined by the symmetry energy density slope L(ρ) at ρc=0.11fm−3≈2/3ρ0 (ρ0 is nuclear saturation density), roughly corresponding to the average density of finite nuclei. The PREX collaboration recently reported a model-independent extraction of Δrnp208=0.283±0.071 fm for the Δrnp of Pb208, suggesting a rather stiff symmetry energy Esym(ρ) with L(ρc)≥52 MeV. We show that the Esym(ρ) cannot be too stiff and L(ρc)≤73 MeV is necessary to be compatible with (1) the ground-state properties and giant monopole resonances of finite nuclei, (2) the constraints on the equation of state of symmetric nuclear matter at suprasaturation densities from flow data in heavy-ion collisions, (3) the largest neutron star (NS) mass reported so far for PSR J0740+6620, (4) the NS tidal deformability extracted from gravitational wave signal GW170817, and (5) the mass-radius of PSR J0030+045 measured simultaneously by NICER. This allows us to obtain 52≤L(ρc)≤73 MeV and 0.212≤Δrnp208≤0.271 fm and further Esym(ρ0)=34.3±1.7 MeV, L(ρ0)=83.1±24.7 MeV, and Esym(2ρ0)=62.8±15.9 MeV. A number of critical implications on nuclear physics and astrophysics are discussed.

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Phys. Rev. Research 4, L022054– Published 8 June, 2022
  • Received 15 February 2021
  • Revised 9 February 2022
  • Accepted 24 May 2022
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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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