This review article takes stock of the progress made in understanding the phase transition in hot nuclei and highlights the coherence of observed signatures
We study an effective relativistic mean-field model of nuclear matter with arbitrary proton fraction at finite temperature in the framework of nonextensive statistical mechanics, characterized by power-law quantum distributions. We investigate the presence of thermodynamic instability in a warm and asymmetric nuclear medium and study the consequent nuclear liquid-gas phase transition by requiring the Gibbs conditions on the global conservation of baryon number and electric charge fraction. We show that nonextensive statistical effects play a crucial role in the equation of state and in the formation of mixed phase also for small deviations from the standard Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics.
Finite systems such as atomic nuclei present at phase transition specific features different from those observed at the thermodynamic limit. Several characteristic signals were found in samples of events resulting from heavy ion collisions at and above the Fermi energy. The concomitant observation of different signatures of a liquid-gas phase transition in nuclei on a given sample strongly supports the occurrence of this transition.
The dynamics and thermodynamics of phase transition in hot nuclei are studied through experimental results on multifragmentation of heavy systems (A$geq$200) formed in central heavy ion collisions. Different signals indicative of a phase transition studied in the INDRA collaboration are presented and their consistency is stressed.
By using freeze-out properties of multifragmenting hot nuclei produced in quasifusion central $^{129}$Xe+$^{nat}$Sn collisions at different beam energies (32, 39, 45 and 50 AMeV) which were estimated by means of a simulation based on experimental data collected by the $4pi$ INDRA multidetector, heat capacity in the thermal excitation energy range 4 - 12.5 AMeV was calculated from total kinetic energies and multiplicities at freeze-out. The microcanonical formulation was employed. Negative heat capacity which signs a first order phase transition for finite systems is observed and confirms previous results using a different method.
Critical temperature Tc for the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition is stimated both from the multifragmentation and fission data. In the first case,the critical temperature is obtained by analysis of the IMF yields in p(8.1 GeV)+Au collisions within the statistical model of multifragmentation (SMM). In the second case, the experimental fission probability for excited 188Os is compared with the calculated one with Tc as a free parameter. It is concluded for both cases that the critical temperature is higher than 16 MeV.