Aspects of incompressibility

The nuclear matter incompressibility K∞ (usually called the ''compressibility'' for some reason lost in antiquity) has been receiving an increasing amount of attention lately. Quite a spirited discussion is underway between groups who favor rather low values for use in simulations of supernova explosions, those who favor much higher values for the explanation of certain measurements in high-energy nuclear collisions, and many others who favor various intermediate values. The purpose of this paper is to present some preliminary results concerning the value of K∞ arising from a statistical model of macroscopic nuclear properties that is currently under development by Wladek Swiatecki and myself. This model, which is described in the next section, is meant to serve as a replacement for the traditional Liquid Drop Model and Droplet Model and their various extensions. It is itself an extension of the Thomas-Fermi approach of Seyler and Blanchard. However, it is important to note that we do not regard this approach as a poor approximation to Hartree-Fock, but rather as a vast improvement over the traditional LDM type approaches with their obvious limitations for light nuclei, at the drip lines, for large deformations, and other extreme situations such as large amounts of angular momentum or electric charge. 11 refs., 4 figs