ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Astron. Space Sci., 04 December 2024

Sec. Nuclear Physics​

Volume 11 - 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2024.1505560

The nuclear symmetry energy and the neutron skin thickness in nuclei

  • INFN Sezione di Catania, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Università di Catania, Catania, Italy

Abstract

Introduction:

We investigate possible correlations between the stiffness of the symmetry energy at saturation density, the so-called parameter, and the neutron skin thickness of 48Ca and 208Pb, for which the recent measurements from the CREX and PREX I + II experiments at the Thomas Jefferson Laboratory became available.

Methods:

We choose an ensemble of nucleonic equations of state (EoS) derived within microscopic (BHF, Variational, AFDMC) and phenomenological (Skyrme, RMF, DD-RMF) approaches. They are all compatible with the laboratory nuclear collisions data and with current observations of neutron stars (NS) mass and the tidal polarizability of a 1.4 NS, as deduced from the GW170817 event.

Results:

We find some degree of correlation between the parameter and the neutron skin thickness whereas a much weaker correlation does exist with the tidal polarizability and the symmetry energy at saturation density. However, some EoS which are able to explain the CREX experimental data, are not compatible with the PREX I + II data, and viceversa.

Conclusion:

We confirm the results previously obtained with a different set of EoS models, and find a possible tension between the experimental data and the current understanding of the nuclear EoS.

1 Introduction

The nuclear symmetry energy plays a major role on the structure of neutron-rich finite nuclei as well as on the bulk properties of neutron stars (; ). In the past decades, several laboratory experiments (Russotto et al., 2023) have been performed in order to investigate the symmetry energy in finite nuclei, e.g., measurements of the nuclear masses (Möller et al., 2012), the nuclear dipole polarizability (Roca-Maza et al., 2015), the giant and pygmy dipole resonance energies (; ), isobaric analog states (), and the neutron skin thickness (; ). Several neutron stars (NS) properties are sensitive to the symmetry energy, e.g., its internal composition, the crust-core transition density and therefore the crust thickness, and the presence of fast direct URCA neutrino processes which regulate NS cooling (Yakovlev and Pethick, 2004; ).

The symmetry energy is directly related to the more general and comprehensive task of the study of the equation of state (EoS), which plays a major role in nuclear structure studies, analysis of the heavy-ion collision dynamics, and the physics of compact objects (Oertel et al., 2017; ). The central density likely reached in NS interiors is about one order of magnitude larger than the nuclear saturation density, and this poses serious problems in theoretical astrophysics, because a correct theory of nuclear interactions for highly dense matter should be derived from the quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The well-known sign problem of lattice QCD still bars access to the high-density EoS, and therefore, models extracted from the nuclear many-body theory are required in order to build the EoS. Predictions have to be tested both in terrestrial laboratories, and in astrophysical observations. The most promising NS observables are the mass and radius; as far as the masses are regarding, the ones of several NSs are known with good precision (; ; ; ; ; Romani et al., 2022), while the information on their radii (Özel and Freire, 2016; ) has been improved thanks to the combined observations of NICER (Riley et al., 2019; ) and Advanced LIGO and Virgo collaborations, with the detection of gravitational waves emitted during the GW170817 NS merger event (; ; ). This event has provided us with important new information on the NS mass and radii by means of the measurement of the tidal deformability (; ), thus deducing upper and lower limits on it (; Radice et al., 2018). Further constraints on mass and radius have been recently reported by NICER for PSR J1231-1411, having mass (Salmi et al., 2024).

In this paper, we concentrate on the study of the neutron skin thickness in neutron-rich nuclei, such as 208Pb and 48Ca, which has long been recognized as being strongly dependent on the slope of the symmetry parameter . Novel data on 208Pb (PREX-I and PREX-II) () and 48Ca (CREX) () with direct measurements consisting of parity-violating and elastic electron scattering technique (), recently became available from the Thomas Jefferson Laboratory. Correlations between the neutron skin thickness, symmetry parameters, and NS observables like the radius of 1.4 and tidal polarizability have been widely analyzed, see, e.g., (), and references therein.

In our previous paper (), we studied those kind of correlations by choosing a set of EoS based on microscopic methods and phenomenological approaches, and discussing their behaviour with respect to the PREX-I experimental data, which were the available ones at that time. Now, we would like to elaborate more on that analysis, taking into account the recent PREX-II () and CREX data (). Moreover, we now choose a set of equations of state EoS which are compatible with the NS data on the highest observed mass and tidal polarizability of a 1.4 , . This way, we should be able to improve our study on the possible correlations among observational quantities and properties of nuclear matter close to saturation.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we illustrate some basic properties of the EoS adopted in this work, along with the criteria selection for the choice of the optimal EoS. The laboratory and observational constraints on the nuclear EoS are presented in Section 3. The neutron skin thickness is discussed in Section 4, and conclusions are drawn in Section 5.

2 The nuclear equation of state

The composition of high density nuclear matter currently represents one of the most intriguing issues in theoretical physics, and several and diverse predictions have been proposed thus far (). The description of the extreme density conditions can include different scenarios, e.g., a purely nucleonic one characterized by a large neutron-proton asymmetry, or hyperonic matter or a hadron-quark phase transition. All those issues suffer of drawbacks that the current experimental data, either heavy-ion collisions in terrestrial laboratories or NS observations, cannot solve. In this work, we assume that nucleons are the most relevant degrees of freedom.

Theoretical approaches to determine the nuclear EoS are usually classified in microscopic and phenomenological ones. The interested reader is referred to recent reviews (; ); in this paper, we skip details and summarize the main features of the adopted methods. For the microscopic approaches, we adopt several EoS derived in the Brueckner–Hartree–Fock (BHF) theory (), which is based on the use of realistic two- and three-body forces (TBF), derived from meson-exchange theory (; Nagels et al., 1978) and describe correctly the nucleonic phase shifts and the properties of the deuteron. For the TBF we use the phenomenological Urbana model (Pudliner et al., 1995; 1997; ), and a microscopic TBF (; ; Zuo et al., 2002; ; ). We adopt as nucleon-nucleon potentials the Bonn B (; ), the Nijmegen 93 (Nagels et al., 1978; Stoks et al., 1994), and the Argonne (Wiringa et al., 1995), which are supplemented by microscopic TBF and labeled in the following as BOB, N93 and V18. The Urbana model has been used with the Argonne potential and is labeled as UIX. The explicit inclusion of the quark-gluon degrees of freedom in the construction of a potential model has been performed in Ref. (; ), in which case two different EoS versions labeled respectively as FSS2CC and FSS2GC in Table 1 have been obtained. Besides BHF EoS, in this paper we exploit the often-used results of the relativistic Dirac-BHF method (DBHF) (), which employs the Bonn A potential, the variational APR EoS () based on the potential, and the so-called CBF-EI model, obtained within the correlated basis function approach (), using a realistic nuclear Hamiltonian with the Argonne V6’ (Wiringa and Pieper, 2002) and the Urbana IX nuclear potentials as TBF. For completeness, we also include in our set a parametrization of the Auxiliary Field Diffusion Monte Carlo (AFDMC) calculation ().

TABLE 1

Model classEoS[MeV][MeV][MeV][MeV]
MicroscopicBOB0.17015.4023833.7070.005702.50
V180.17813.9020732.3067.004402.36
N930.18516.1022936.5077.004732.25
UIX0.17114.9017133.5061.003091.96
FSS2CC0.15716.3021931.8052.002951.94
FSS2GC0.17015.6018531.0051.002622.08
DBHF0.18116.2021834.4069.006812.31
APR0.15915.9023333.4051.002502.19
CBF-EI0.16010.9024030.0068.005012.47
AFDMC0.16016.0023931.3060.002562.20
SkyrmeRs0.15815.0524830.8386.419102.27
SGI0.15515.8926528.3563.857142.31
SLy00.16016.0122631.4045.373152.06
SLy10.16115.9823332.5948.883142.06
SLy20.16115.9223532.3948.843182.06
SLy30.16115.9623332.1245.562952.05
SLy40.16015.9723231.8545.383092.06
SLy50.16115.9823232.7050.343282.07
SLy60.15915.9223031.2145.213342.09
SLy70.15915.9023332.4148.113372.09
SLy80.16115.9623332.5145.363162.06
SLy90.15115.7922932.1255.375132.23
SLy100.15615.9023232.1939.242622.04
SLy230a0.16015.9823031.8843.993402.16
SkI40.16016.1523929.3859.345812.29
SkMP0.15715.5723029.7069.706662.19
SkO0.16115.7822832.1979.926562.10
SkO′0.16015.7322232.1069.684652.00
SkT40.15915.9523535.2393.489192.23
SkT50.16415.9920137.60100.38072.08
BSk200.16016.0424130.0037.403282.18
BSk250.15815.9923629.0036.905452.22
BSk260.15916.0324030.0037.503322.18
RMFSINPA0.15116.0020431.2454.015862.00
SINPB0.15016.0420633.9271.476231.99
GL970.15215.5622632.1088.556002.00
BigApple0.15516.3422631.3339.887962.62
BSR80.14816.0423331.1960.607922.05
BSR90.14816.0723431.6864.077932.04
FSUGarnet0.15316.2322930.8953.857402.12
FSUGZ030.14816.0723431.6164.177942.04
G2*0.15315.9521330.2969.436922.05
IUFSU0.16016.7024131.8849.576022.00
G30.14816.0224430.2045.344612.00
IOPB-I0.14916.1022233.3063.546812.15
NITR0.15516.3222431.5143.466832.36
DD-RMFDD0.14816.5023932.5858.737502.43
DD20.14816.0224032.0358.007532.44
DD-ME10.15216.2324534.1358.387042.46
DD-ME20.15216.1425133.3954.257662.50
TW-990.15216.1023933.1858.404462.10
Exp.
Ref.[a][a][b], [c][d], [e][d], [e][f][g]

Saturation properties predicted by the considered EoSs. Experimental nuclear parameters and observational data are listed for comparison. The references in the lower part of the table are labeled as [a] (); [b] (Shlomo et al., 2006); [c] (Piekarewicz, 2010); [d] (); [e] (); [f] (); and [g] (). See text for details.

The philosophy of the phenomenological approaches is quite different from the one characterizing microscopic methods. In fact, they are based on effective interactions that are built to describe finite nuclei in their ground state, and therefore, predictions at high isospin asymmetries and density have to be taken with care (Stone and Reinhard, 2007). Among the most used ones, we mention Skyrme interactions (Vautherin and Brink, 1972) and relativistic mean-field (RMF) models (). In this work, we use a set of modern Skyrme EoS, which are listed in Table 1; in particular we mention the SLy0-SLy10 () and SLy230a (; ) of the Lyon group, and the BSk20, BSk25 and BSk26 of the Brussels group (Potekhin et al., 2013; ), the latter ones being unified EoS constructed on the basis of the energy-density functional theory. A complementary approach is given by RMF models, which are based on effective Lagrangian densities. The interaction between baryons is described in terms of meson exchanges, which are regulated by coupling constants of nucleons with mesons, and are usually fixed by fitting the bulk properties of nuclear matter as well as masses and radii of finite nuclei. In this work, we consider two types of RMF models: models with density-dependent coupling constants labeled DD-RMF (Nikšić et al., 2002; Typel and Wolter, 1999; Xia et al., 2022) and RMF models with fixed coupling strength (Mondal et al., 2016; ; ; ; ; ; Sulaksono and Mart, 2006; ; ; ; Routaray et al., 2023).

The main properties of the chosen EoS at saturation density are listed in Table 1. We notice that, whereas the saturation properties of the phenomenological models are within the empirical range, some microscopic EoS are marginally compatible with it. The reason is that the parameters of the phenomenological models are fitted on the saturation properties, while they are a prediction in the case of microscopic calculations, and those depend both on the many-body approach and the choice of the employed forces. For instance, the V18 EoS predicts a slightly too low saturation energy and compressibility , which is mainly due to the inclusion of a particular TBF (). We stress that a complete ab-initio theory of TBF is not available yet.

For completeness, we remind that the above mentioned methods are suited for describing the homogeneous component of the nuclear matter EoS, and that at densities , clusters have to be included for the description of the NS crust. For that, we use the well-known Negele-Vautherin EoS (Negele and Vautherin, 1973) in the density range , and the ones by Baym-Pethick-Sutherland () and Feynman-Metropolis-Teller () for densities typical of the outer crust.

2.1 Criteria for the selection of the EoS

The most important criterium for selecting the EoS is to check its behaviour with respect to the saturation properties of nuclear matter. In fact, around saturation density and isospin asymmetry [being the number of protons (neutrons)], the energy per particle of asymmetric nuclear matter see Equations 13 can be expanded as a function of density and isospin asymmetry, and the coefficients are given by a set of few isoscalar and isovector parameters (see Equations 47), which can be constrained by nuclear experiments. The expansion reads.where , is the energy per particle of symmetric nuclear matter (SNM) at , the incompressibility and is the symmetry energy coefficient at saturation, defined as

The density dependence of the symmetry energy around saturation is characterized by the parameters and , which are expressed as.

In Table 1, we list the saturation properties of the various considered EoSs, and compare them with available experimental data. Measurements of nuclear masses () and density distributions () yield the saturation point MeV and , whereas the value of can be extracted from the analysis of isoscalar giant monopole resonances in heavy nuclei, reporting MeV () or MeV (Piekarewicz, 2004), in agreement with the low value of found in heavy ion collision experiments (). We also notice that, whereas is more or less well established ( MeV), the values of , is still quite uncertain (Reed, B. T., Fattoyev, F. J., Horowitz, C. J., and Piekarewicz, J., 2021; ; ). Also is poorly constrained (Tews et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2017).

Besides the laboratory data, we also exploit astrophysical observation of NS. A very important constraint to be fulfilled by the different EoS is the value of the maximum NS mass, which has to be compatible with the observational data (; ; ), in particular, the recent lower limit (). The GW detection by Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo (; ; ) of the GW170817 event put strong constraints on the so-called tidal polarizability (; ; ), which is strongly influenced by the EoS. The GW170817 analysis for a NS () gave an upper limit of , which was later improved to ().

From Table 1, we notice that most of the adopted EoSs in this work are compatible with the nuclear empirical values, the NS maximum mass, and the tidal deformability of a 1.4 NS. We, therefore, consider this set of EoSs for the analysis of the neutron skin thickness, which is discussed in the following Section 4.

3 Constraints on the nuclear EoS

An important check for the EoS is the behaviour of the symmetry energy slope vs. , and this is plotted in Figure 1. The full green triangles represent the microscopic calculations (left panel), whereas the phenomenological ones are shown in the right panel. The experimental constraints indicate those derived from the study of isospin diffusion in heavy ion collisions (HIC, blue band) (Tsang et al., 2009); the electric dipole polarizability (violet band) (Roca-Maza et al., 2015); the neutron skin thickness in Sn isotopes (orange band) (); the finite-range droplet mass model calculations (FRDM, magenta rectangle) (Möller et al., 2012); the isobaric analog state (IAS) phenomenology combined with the 208Pb neutron-skin thickness (green band) (); the recent analysis of the PREX-II experiment (black cross) (). The blue solid curve is the unitary gas bound (Tews et al., 2017): only values of to the right of the curve are allowed. We see that all considered constraints are not simultaneously fulfilled in any area of the parameter space, probably because of the strong model dependencies in the extraction of the constraints from the raw data. Hence, at the moment, no theoretical models can be ruled out a priori, except those which are predicting values of the symmetry energy parameters outside the considered range.

FIGURE 1

A further important check regards the high-density behaviour of the nuclear symmetry energy, as illustrated in Ref. (Russotto et al., 2023). In the last few years several heavy-ion collisions experiments at relativistic energies have been performed in order to constrain the high-density symmetry energy. Figure 2 displays the ASY-EOS data (Russotto et al., 2016) (blue band) and the FOPI-LAND ones (Russotto et al., 2011) (light green band) as a function of the density, HIC (Sn + Sn) diffuseness measurements (Tsang et al., 2009) (grey band), whereas the red dashed contour labeled by IAS shows the results of Ref. (). For completeness, we also display the results of a Bayesian analysis (Tsang et al., 2024) which determines the boundaries at 68% (dark pink) and 95% confidence intervals (light pink) of the posterior distributions using an initial sample size of 3M of EoS. The experimental data are plotted up to , and they all show a monotonically increasing behaviour with increasing density. In the four panels the symmetry energy is plotted vs. the nucleonic density for the microscopic models (upper left), for some of the Skyrme models (upper right), RMF models (lower left), and DD-RMF models (lower right) listed in Table 1. Except a couple of cases, i.e., BSk26 and SLy10, all EoS agree with the experimental data and the Bayesian analysis, thus confirming the need of more accurate experiments in order to disentangle the various theoretical approaches.

FIGURE 2

4 The neutron skin thickness

The strong correlation between the neutron skin thickness and the slope parameter at normal nuclear saturation density was shown first by Brown and Typel (; Typel and Brown, 2001), and confirmed later by other authors (Steiner et al., 2005; ; ; ; ). A measurement of the thickness allows to establish an empirical calibration point for the pressure of neutron star matter at subnuclear densities, and coupled with a NS radius measurement could determine the pressure at supranuclear densities. In fact, the neutron skin thickness and the NS size originate both from the pressure of neutron-rich matter, hence are sensitive to the same EoS. Therefore, the Typel-Brown correlation would be helpful in establishing the pressure–density relationship over a wide range of densities inside neutron stars.

The neutron skin thickness can be defined as the difference between the neutron and proton root-mean-square radii: . Since the microscopic approaches discussed before are not suited for the description of finite nuclei, we prefer to use a different approach based on Ref. (Vidaña et al., 2009), in which an estimation of the neutron skin thickness of 208Pb and 132Sn was made following the suggestion of Ref. (Steiner et al., 2005). In this case is calculated to lowest order in the diffuseness corrections as , being the thickness of semi-infinite asymmetric nuclear matter

In that expression, is the surface energy taken from the semi-empirical mass formula equal to 17.23 MeV, is obtained from the normalization condition , and is the isospin asymmetry in the center of the nucleus taken as according to Thomas-Fermi calculations. For consistency, we use this same method also for calculating the thickness in the phenomenological approaches. In Figure 3, we show the results of our calculations and compare them with experimental bands regarding CREX (left panel, magenta) and PREX I + II (right panel, cyan). Those experiments yield for PREX I + II a neutron skin thickness , whereas the measurement of the neutron skin of 48Ca with the same technique gives smaller values, i.e., , thus pushing towards larger or smaller values respectively. Data are shown as a function of the parameter . The linear increase of R with is not surprising because the neutron skin thickness in heavy nuclei is determined by the pressure difference between neutrons and protons, and this is proportional to the parameter , that is, . We notice that the theoretical predictions show some correlation between and , as indicated by the linear fits (solid line) and by the value of the correlation coefficient, , in both cases. This is slightly smaller than the previous result shown in ref. (), where the chosen EoS set was not filtered with respect to the NS observational data. It has to be noticed that, in both cases, the microscopic calculations alone seem to lie on a curve with a slope different than the one of the phenomenological calculations. However, due to the small number of points available for the microscopic approaches, no firm conclusion can be drawn. We also notice that the same EoS is unable to reproduce both the CREX and PREX I + II data; for instance, among the microscopic approaches, the CREX data set is well reproduced by the FSS2CC, V18, and CBF-EI models, whereas DBHF, BOB, and UIX fall in the range of PREX I + II. Those EoS differ not only by the many-body technique adopted, but also by the nucleon-nucleon interaction. A similar behavior can also be found for the phenomenological models such as Rs, SkT4, BSR8, and GL97 respectively. This might indicate a possible tension between the experimental data and the current understanding of the EoS. Though, it has to be stressed that the present calculations of the neutron skin thickness are based on the concept of semi-infinite nuclear matter (see Equation 8), which could be inappropriate. However, a similar result has already been found in other works, using suitable methods for finite nuclei (). Further laboratory experiments on medium size nuclei, or a re-analysis of the current data could help to clarify this point.

FIGURE 3

; ). The solid lines indicate a linear fit of the EoS data. The values of the corresponding correlation factors are also given.

Finally, in Figure 4, we display a correlation matrix among the saturation properties shown in Table 1, with , and the neutron skin thickness for 48Ca and 208Pb. The matrix confirms the weak correlation of with the parameter already shown in Figure 3. A weaker degree of correlation is found between and (r = 0.55), whereas no evident correlation between and and is found.

FIGURE 4

5 Conclusions

In this work, we have analyzed the predictions of microscopic and phenomenological EoS for the neutron skin thickness of 48Ca and 208Pb, and compared with the recent experimental data, CREX and PREX I + II. We have used an ensemble of different EoS models, that includes microscopic calculations based on the (Dirac)Brueckner–Hartree–Fock theory, the variational method, and Quantum Monte Carlo techniques, as well as several phenomenological Skyrme, and RMF models. The chosen EoSs are compatible with the constraints imposed by laboratory data on saturation properties of finite nuclei, and observational data by NICER and GW170817 regarding the NS mass and .

We have found a linear correlation between the neutron skin thickness of 48Ca and 208Pb and the parameter, as already pointed out by several authors using nonrelativistic and relativistic phenomenological models. A weaker linear correlation with the tidal deformability is evident.

The most important result of our analysis is that the same EoS cannot reproduce at the same time the CREX and PREX I + II experimental data. Therefore, those measurements do not allow us to select the most compatible EoS among the ones considered in this work. Future NS observations, along with planned experiments in existing facilities or in next-generation radioactive ion beam laboratories, are fundamental to provide more stringent constraints on the nuclear EoS, thus finally improving our knowledge of the extreme density matter conditions.

Statements

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Author contributions

GFB: Conceptualization, Methodology, Validation, Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing. HCD: Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing–review and editing. IV: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Writing–review and editing.

Funding

The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

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The author(s) declare that no Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript.

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Summary

Keywords

neutron star, equation of state, many-body methods of nuclear matter, neutron skin thickness, CREX, PREX I + II

Citation

Burgio GF, Das HC and Vidaña I (2024) The nuclear symmetry energy and the neutron skin thickness in nuclei. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 11:1505560. doi: 10.3389/fspas.2024.1505560

Received

03 October 2024

Accepted

28 October 2024

Published

04 December 2024

Volume

11 - 2024

Edited by

Armen Sedrakian, University of Wrocław, Poland

Reviewed by

Praveen C. Srivastava, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India

Charalampos Moustakidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

Updates

Copyright

*Correspondence: G. F. Burgio,

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All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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