Variational calculation for the equation of state of nuclear matter at finite temperatures

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 composed of the Argonne V18 and UIX potentials. The energy is evaluated in the two-body cluster approximation with the three-body-force contribution treated phenomenologically so as to reproduce the empirical saturation conditions. The obtained energies for symmetric nuclear matter and neutron matter at zero temperature are in fair agreement with those by Akmal, Pandharipande and Ravenhall, and the maximum mass of the neutron star is 2.2M(circle dot). At finite temperatures, a variational method by Schmidt and Pandharipande is employed to evaluate the free energy, which is used to derive various thermodynamic quantities of nuclear matter necessary for supernova simulations. The result of this variational method at finite temperatures is found to be self-consistent. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.