From nuclear reactions to compact stars: a unified approach

An equation of state (EoS) for symmetric nuclear matter is constructed using the density dependent M3Y effective interaction and extended for isospin asymmetric nuclear matter. Theoretically obtained values of symmetric nuclear matter incompressibility, isobaric incompressibility, symmetry energy and its slope agree well with experimentally extracted values. Folded microscopic potentials using this effective interaction, whose density dependence is determined from nuclear matter calculations, provide excellent descriptions for proton, alpha and cluster radioactivities, elastic and inelastic scattering. The nuclear deformation parameters extracted from inelastic scattering of protons agree well with other available results. The high density behavior of symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter satisfies the constraints from the observed flow data of heavy-ion collisions. The neutron star properties studied using $\beta$-equilibrated neutron star matter obtained from this effective interaction for pure hadronic model agree with the recent observations of the massive compact stars such as PSR J1614-2230, but if a phase transition to quark matter is considered such agreement is no longer possible.Comment: 17 pages including 12 figures and 6 tables. To be published in Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2014) 129. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1309.6793, arXiv:1111.4617, arXiv:0707.4620, arXiv:0905.1599, arXiv:0907.5350, arXiv:nucl-th/0407001; and text overlap with arXiv:0709.0900 by other author

CuO surfaces and CO2 activation: a dispersion-corrected DFT plus U Study

We have used computational methodology based on the density functional theory to describe both copper(I) and copper(II) oxides, followed by the investigation of a number of different low index CuO surfaces. Different magnetic orderings of all the surfaces were studied, and reconstructions of the polar surfaces are proposed. A detailed discussion on stabilities, electronic structure, and magnetic properties is presented. CuO(111) and CuO(111) were found to have the lowest surface energies, and their planes dominate in the calculated Wulff morphology of the CuO crystal. We next investigated the adsorption of CO2 on the three most exposed CuO surfaces, viz., (111), (111), and (011), by exploring various adsorption sites and configurations. We show that the CO2 molecule is activated on the CuO surfaces, with an adsorption energy of −93 kJ/mol on the (011) surface, showing exothermic adsorption, while (111) and (111) surfaces show comparatively weak adsorption. The activation of the CO2 molecule is characterized by large structural transformations and significant charge transfer, i.e., forming a negatively charged bent CO2–δ species with elongated C–O bonds, which is further confirmed by vibrational analyses showing considerable red shift in the frequencies as a result of the activation