Abstract
I make two comments about nuclear matter. First, I consider the effects of a coupling between the chiral field, , and the meson, ; for any net baryon density, a condensate for is unavoidably generated. I assume that with increasing density, a decrease of the chiral condensate and the effective mass gives a stiff equation of state (EOS). In order to match that onto a soft EOS for quarkyonic matter, I consider an field at large , where at nonzero temperature quantum fluctuations disorder, any putative pion “condensates” into a quantum pion liquid () [R. D. Pisarski et al., Phys. Rev. D 102, 016015 (2020)]. In this paper, I show that the persists at zero temperature. If valid qualitatively at , the mass goes up sharply and suppresses the condensate. This could generate a spike in the speed of sound at high density, which is of relevance to neutron stars. Second, I propose a toy model of a gauge theory with three flavors of fermions, where vortices confine fermions into baryons. In dimensions, this model can be studied numerically with present techniques, using either classical or quantum computers.
- Received 18 December 2020
- Accepted 24 March 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.L071504
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society