Density Dependence of Nuclear Matter Symmetry Energy: VMC Calculations

A Variational Monte-Carlo (VMC) method is employed to investigate the density dependence of the symmetry energy of isospin asymmetric nuclear matter. The realistic Urbana 14 nucleon–nucleon interaction potential of Lagaris and Pandharipande was used in the VMC calculations with addition of a phenomenological density-dependent term to simulate many-body interactions. The symmetry energy is obtained for different densities and compared with the data found in the literature, and it was observed that the results obtained in this study reasonably agree with the results found in the literature, and the symmetry energy is found to increase almost linearly with the density. We obtained the symmetry energy coefficient at saturation density fm to be about 26.89 MeV, which is in agreement with the empirical value 30 4 MeV. Also, the incompressibility factor of the nuclear matter and the equation of the state of pure neutron matter were reported. The results obtained are consistent with those obtained by various authors with different potentials and techniques.