Variations on the excluded-volume mechanism

The conventional excluded-volume mechanism in the theoretical description of matter properties is generalized by introducing more general functional dependencies of the available volume fraction. The requirement of thermodynamic consistency governs the appearance of rearrangement contributions to thermodynamic quantities and to particle potentials. The main features of the method are studied in three examples: the dissolution of deuterons in warm and dense nuclear matter, the stiffening or softening of the nuclear matter equation of state in a relativistic mean-field model, and the effects of medium-dependent effective degeneracy factors in a Fermi gas model for quark matter. (orig.)