Abstract
The liquid gas phase transition in nuclear systems is a unique phenomenon, at the frontier of nuclear, many-body and statistical physics. We use self-consistent mean-field calculations to quantify the properties of the transition in symmetric nuclear matter. We explore the available parameter space of critical properties by analyzing the mean-field dependence of the phase transition. The latent heat of the transition is computed and we find that it exhibits a model independent temperature dependence due to basic physical principles.