Cold alpha matter

No, this post is not about an insensitive caveman named Alpha proclaiming his importance. Sorry to disappoint. This post is about Serban Misicu's talk on different potential models for the alpha-alpha interaction potential at 0 temperature. The interaction potential models Serban discussed all qualitatively resembled a Lennard-Jones potential; namely they were the Ali-Bodmer, Gogny-D1, Gogny-D1S, and Gogny-D1N potentials. There was also mention of using variational theory of bose liquids to build up from a 2-body force to a 4-body force and beyond. Unfortunately I can't report much more than that about the potentials because I became somewhat bogged down in equations...so I'll skip to the important points: regarding the interaction potential, "there is a significant dependence of saturation on the 2-body potential" and using alpha-cluster expansion and hypernetic chains to model dilute alpha matter provides "consistent results."

You may wonder, does cold alpha matter....matter? Yes! It is present in various places in our universe: clusterization on the surface of nuclei, the Hoyle state in 12C when modeled as a 3-alpha nuclear model, and low density nuclear matter composed of protons, neutrons, and alphas near the neutrino-sphere in core collapse supernovae, to name a few.

If this type of physics is your cup of tea then I strongly urge you to see Serban's slides on the proceedings wiki, as there were equations galore that I can't really describe here. ... that is of course if he actually gets added as a speaker on the wiki page.