Dottorato in FISICA

Titolo della tesi: Modeling Nuclear Dynamics in the Age of Multimessenger Astrophysics

Understanding the properties of dense and cold nuclear matter, which is expected to characterize the neutron star core, is one of the challenges of modern physics. In this Thesis we have explored the effect of including relativistic boost corrections within the derivation of a realistic nuclear effective potential—carried out from a phenomenological Hamiltonian using the formalism of correlated basis function and cluster expansion techniques—describing the interaction between nucleons in the nuclear medium. Our work highlighted the importance of developing a consistent treatment of boost corrections and three-nucleon forces. Indeed it should be kept in mind that the introduction of such relativistic corrections must be complemented with a softening of the isoscalar three-nucleon repulsion, which strongly affects the high density properties of nuclear matter. For this reason we also present the results of a pioneering study aimed at inferring information on the three-nucleon repulsion from multimessenger neutron star observations. We have performed bayesian inference employing the currently available multimessenger datasets in order to constrain the coupling constant of three-nucleon repulsion in dense matter.