VARIATIONAL CALCULATION FOR THE EQUATION OF STATE OF NUCLEAR MATTER TOWARD SUPERNOVA SIMULATIONS

An equation of state (EOS) for uniform nuclear matter is constructed at zero and finite temperatures with the variational method starting from the realistic nuclear Hamiltonian, and applied to the Thomas-Fermi (TF) calculations for atomic nuclei, toward a nuclear EOS for supernova simulations. For uniform nuclear matter at zero temperature, the two-body energy is evaluated in the two-body cluster approximation and the contribution of the three nucleon interaction (TNI) is taken into account phenomenologically. Parameters included in the TNI energy are determined so as to reproduce the empirical saturation conditions. At finite temperatures, a variational method by Schmidt and Pandharipande is employed to evaluate the free energy and related thermodynamic quantities. In the TF calculations for atomic nuclei, the parameters in the uniform EOS are tuned to reproduce empirical masses and RMS charge radii for β-stable nuclei.