Influence of the Effective Mass on the Properties of Nuclear Matter at Finite Density and Temperature

The significance of the chiral symmetry restoration is studied by considering the role of the modification of the nucleon mass in nuclear medium at finite density and temperature. Using the Korea-IBS-Daegu-SKKU density functional theory, we can create models that have an identical nuclear matter equation of state but different isoscalar and isovector effective masses at zero temperature. The effect of the effective mass becomes transparent at non-zero temperatures, and it becomes more important as temperature increases. The role of the effective mass is examined thoroughly by calculating the dependence of thermodynamic variables such as free energy, internal energy, entropy, pressure and chemical potential on density, temperature and proton fraction. We find that sensitivity to the isoscalar effective mass is several times larger than that of the isovector effective mass, so the uncertainties arising from the effective mass are dominated by the isoscalar effective mass. In the analysis of the relative uncertainty, we obtain that the maximum uncertainty is less than 2% for free energy, internal energy and chemical potential, but it amounts to 20% for pressure. Entropy shows a behavior completely different from the other four variables that the uncertainty is about 40% at the saturation density and increases monotonically as density increases. The effect of the uncertainty to properties of physical systems is investigated with the proto-neutron star. It is shown that temperature depends strongly on the effective mass at a given density, and substantial swelling of the radius occurs due to the finite temperature. The equation of state is stiffer with smaller isoscalar effective mass, so the effect of the effective mass appears clearly in the mass–radius relation of the proto-neutron star, where a larger radius corresponds to a smaller effective mass.