Submitted on September 4, 2002
Accepted on October 22, 2002
Determination of the Equation of State of Dense Matter
Pawel Danielewicz 1,
Roy Lacey 2,
William G. Lynch 3*
1 NSCL and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824-1321, USA; Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung, 64291 Darmstadt, Germany.
2 Department of Chemistry, State University of New York, Stony Brook NY, USA.
3 NSCL and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824-1321, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: lynch{at}nscl.msu.edu.
Nuclear collisions can compress nuclear matter to densities achieved within neutron stars and within core collapse supernovae. These dense states of matter exist momentarily before expanding. We analyze the flow of matter to extract pressures in excess of 1034 Pa, the highest recorded under laboratory-controlled conditions. Using these analyses, we rule out strongly repulsive nuclear equations of state from relativistic mean field theory and weakly repulsive equations of state with phase transitions at densities less than three times that of stable nuclei, but not equations of state softened at higher densities due to a transformation to quark matter.
