Critical Temperature of Lequid-gas Phase Transition for Hot Nuclear Matter and Three-body Force Effect

The finite temperature Brueckner-Hartree-Fock (FTBHF) approach is extended by introducing a microscopic three-body force. Within the extended approach, the three-body force effects on the equation of state of hot nuclear matter and its temperature dependence have been investigated. The critical properties of the liquid-gas phase transition of hot nuclear matter have been calculated. It is shown that the three-body force provides a repulsive contribution to the equation of state of hot nuclear matter. The repulsive effect of the three-body force becomes more pronounced as the density and temperature increase and consequently inclusion of the three-body force contribution in the calculation reduces the predicted critical temperature from about 16MeV to about 13MeV. By separating the contribution originated from the 2σ-exchange process coupled to the virtual excitation of a nucleon-antinucleon pair from the full three-body force, the connection between the three-body force effect and the relativistic correction from the Dirac-Brueckner-Hartree-Fock has been explored. It turns out that the contribution of the 2σ-NN part is more repulsive than that of the full three-body force and the calculated critical temperature is about 11MeV if only the 2σ-NN component of the three-body force is included which is lower than the value obtained in the case of including the full three-body force and is close to the value predicted by the Dirac-Brueckner-Hartree-Fock (DBHF) approach. Our result provides a reasonable explanation for the discrepancy between the values of critical temperature predicted from the FTBHF approach including the three-body force and the DBHF approach.