Thermal properties of nuclear matter with a momentum-dependent effective interaction

Abstract

We study the effect of the momentum dependence on the thermal properties of excited dilute nuclear matter in the Boltzmann approximation. The optical potential, mean field, k mass, pressure, and incompressibility are calculated. We improve on an earlier approximate treatment and find, in most cases, relatively small quantitative differences in the behavior of the calculated observables. An exception is the k mass, which acquires a temperature dependence in the improved approximation. Phase diagrams for nuclear matter are presented and the transition of hadronic matter to quark-gluon plasma is studied.