Volume Properties of Ground-State Nuclear Matter

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Abstract
An approximation developed by one of the authors for treating macroscopic bound systems in the ground state is applied to a homogeneous system of nuclear matter using a simple separable potential. More extensive numerical results are given for the density, energy density, chemical potential, effective potential, momentum distribution, pressure, and density correlation function. In addition, we discuss an ambiguity in the calculation of the pressure arising directly from the approximation. This ambiguity and its effect on the nuclear parameters at the physically meaningful point of zero pressure is treated in detail. In particular, three different expressions for the pressure are derived which lead to zero-pressure values of -14.4, -17.0, and -17.5 MeV for the binding energy/particle and 0.87, 0.95, and 1.01 F for the interparticle spacing. A numerical examination of the density correlation function suggests, as expected, that correlations of more than two particles are rare at nuclear densities.