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What can nuclear collisions teach us about the boiling of water or the formation of multi-star systems ?

D. H. E. Gross
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Abstract

Phase transitions in nuclei, small atomic clusters and self-gravitating systems demand the extension of thermo-statistics to ``Small'' systems. The main obstacle is the thermodynamic limit. It is shown how the original definition of the entropy by Boltzmann as the volume of the energy-manifold of the N-body phase space allows a {\em geometrical} definition of the entropy as function of the conserved quantities. Without invoking the thermodynamic limit the whole ``zoo'' of phase transitions and critical points/lines can be unambiguously defined. The relation to the Yang--Lee singularities of the grand-canonical partition sum is pointed out. It is shown that just phase transitions in non-extensive systems give the complete set of characteristic parameters of the transition {\em including the surface tension.} Nuclear heavy-ion collisions are an experimental playground to explore this extension of thermo-statistics

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D. H. E. Gross. 2000-06-13. What can nuclear collisions teach us about the boiling of water or the formation of multi-star systems ?. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812810939_0002

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