Temperature Evolution of the Nuclear Shell Structure and the Dynamical Nucleon Effective Mass

Herlik Wibowo, Elena Litvinova, Yinu Zhang, and Paolo Finelli 2020 Phys. Rev. C  102 054321

We study the fermionic Matsubara Green functions in medium-mass nuclei at finite temperature. The single-fermion Dyson equation with the dynamical kernel of the particle-vibration-coupling (PVC) origin is formulated and solved in the basis of Dirac spinors, which minimize the grand canonical potential with the meson-nucleon covariant energy density functional. The PVC correlations beyond mean field are taken into account in the leading approximation for the energy-dependent self-energy, and the full solution of the finite-temperature Dyson equation is obtained for the fermionic propagators. Within this approach, we investigate the fragmentation of the single-particle states and its evolution with temperature for the nuclear systems Ni-56, Ni-68, and Fe-56 relevant for the core-collapse supernova. The energy-dependent, or dynamical, nucleon effective mass is extracted from the PVC self-energy at various temperatures.