Nuclear liquid-gas phase transition within a Brueckner-Hartree-Fock approach

The critical parameters of the liquid-gas phase transition of symmetric nuclear matter are computed using the Brueckner-Hartree-Fock method at finite temperature by employing different realistic nucleon-nucleon potentials. Temperature effects on single-particle potentials, defect functions, and three-body forces are discussed in detail. Results obtained from the full procedure and frozen-correlations approximation are compared. We find critical temperatures of approximately 14 to 19 MeV and critical densities in the range of 0.05 to 0.08 fm(-3), depending on the interactions employed.