Hot Nucleons in Chiral Soliton Models

Theoretical as well as experimental progress has been made in the last decade in describing the properties of baryons. In this review I will mostly report on the theoretical issues. Two non-perturbative methods are privileged frameworks for studying these properties in the low energy domain: chiral perturbation theory, the effective field theory of the Standard Model at energies below 1 GeV and lattice QCD. I will mainly concentrate here on the first one but I will also discu...

After contrasting the low energy effective theory for the baryon sector with one for the Goldstone sector, I use the example of pion nucleon scattering to discuss some of the progress and open issues in baryon chiral perturbation theory.

We study nuclear and neutron matter by combining chiral effective field theory with non-perturbative lattice methods. In our approach nucleons and pions are treated as point particles on a lattice. This allows us to probe larger volumes, lower temperatures, and greater nuclear densities than in lattice QCD. The low energy interactions of these particles are governed by chiral effective theory and operator coefficients are determined by fitting to zero temperature few-body sca...

Studies of the QCD phase diagram must properly include nucleonic degrees of freedom and their thermodynamics in the range of baryon chemical potentials characteristic of nuclear matter. A useful framework for incorporating relevant nuclear physics constraints in this context is a chiral nucleon-meson effective Lagrangian. In the present paper, such a chiral nucleon-meson model is extended with systematic inclusion of mesonic fluctuations using the functional renormalization g...

We present a model independent study of the chiral condensate evolution in a hadronic gas, in terms of temperature and baryon chemical potential. The meson-meson interactions are described within Chiral Perturbation Theory and the pion-nucleon interaction by means of Heavy Baryon Chiral Perturbation Theory, both at one loop. Together with the virial expansion, this provides a model independent systematic expansion at low temperatures and chemical potentials, which includes th...

These lectures give an introduction to baryon chiral perturbation theory. I show in detail how to construct the chiral effective pion-nucleon Lagrangian in the one loop approximation. Particular emphasis is put on the physics related to electromagnetic probes, as manifest in pion photo- and electroproduction, Compton scattering off nucleons and the electroweak form factors of the nucleon. Other topics discussed in some detail are the meaning of low-energy theorems, pion-nucle...

We give a survey of recent development and applications of the chiral quark soliton model (also called the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio soliton model) with $N_f$=2 and $N_f$=3 quark flavors for the structure of baryons. The model is an effective chiral quark model obtained from the instanton liquid model of the quantum chromodynamics. Mesons appear as quark-antiquark excitations and baryons arise as non-topological solitons with three valence quarks and a polarized Dirac sea. In this m...

In this talk I review studies of hadron properties in bosonized chiral quark models for the quark flavor dynamics. Mesons are constructed from Bethe--Salpeter equations and baryons emerge as chiral solitons. Such models require regularization and I show that the two--fold Pauli--Villars regularization scheme not only fully regularizes the effective action but also leads the scaling laws for structure functions. For the nucleon structure functions the present approach serves t...

We compute the finite temperature pole mass shifts of the octet and decuplet baryons using heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory and the 1/N_c expansion, where N_c is the number of QCD colors. We consider temperatures of the order of the pion mass m_\pi, and truncate the chiral and 1/N_c expansions assuming that m_\pi \sim 1/N_c. There are three scales in the problem: the temperature T, the pion mass m_\pi, and the octet--decuplet mass difference. Therefore, the result is n...

We calculate the nucleonic and pionic dispersion relations at finite temperature T and non-vanishing chemical potentials $(\mu_f)$ in the context of an effective chiral theory that describes the strong and electromagnetic interactions for nucleons and pions. The dispersion relations are calculated in the broken chiral symmetry phase, where the nucleons are massive and pions are taken as massless. The calculation is performed at lowest order in the energy expansion, working in...