Spinodal instabilities and the distillation effect in relativistic hadronic models

Liquid-gas phase transitions in asymmetric nuclear matter give rise to a distillation effect that corresponds to the formation of droplets of high-density symmetric matter in a background of a neutron gas possibly with a very small fraction of protons. In the present work we test the model dependence of this effect. We study the spinodal instabilities of asymmetric nuclear matter within six different mean-field relativistic models with both constant and density-dependent coupling parameters. We also consider the effects of introducing the delta meson and the nonlinear omega-rho coupling. It is shown that the distillation effect within density-dependent models is not so efficient and is comparable to results obtained for nonrelativistic models. Thermodynamical instabilities of nuclear matter neutralized by electrons as found in stellar matter are also investigated. The high Fermi energy of electrons completely erases the instability of density-dependent models. The other models still show a small region of instability but the distillation effect completely disappears because the electron presence freezes the proton fluctuations.