Hot Nucleons in Chiral Soliton Models

The comparison of chiral perturbation theory formulae with data from lattice QCD simulations is discussed. Observables in the pion sector as well as in the baryon sector are considered, including the nucleon mass in a finite volume.

We study some bulk thermodynamical characteristics, meson properties and the nucleon as a baryon number one soliton in a hot quark matter in the NJL model as well as in a hot nucleon matter in a hybrid NJL model in which the Dirac sea of quarks is combined with a Fermi sea of nucleons. In both cases, working in mean-field approximation, we find a chiral phase transition from Goldstone to Wigner phase. At finite density the chiral order parameter and the constituent quark mass...

We construct an effective chiral theory for the nucleon, based on the low-energy effective QCD partition function from the QCD instanton vacuum. We fully consider the momentum-dependent dynamical quark mass whose value at the zero virtuality of the quark is determined by the gap equation from the instanton vacuum, $M_0=359$ MeV. The nucleon emerges as a state of $N_c$ valence quarks bound by the pion mean field, which was created self-consistently by the $N_c$ valence quarks....

I review aspects of chiral dynamics pertinent to the structure of baryons and few-nucleon systems, such as chiral extrapolations for the nucleon and the delta mass, double pion photoproduction off protons, single neutral pion electroproduction off the deuteron, pion photoproduction in the delta region, the quark mass dependence of the nuclear forces and the possibility of an infrared limit cycle in QCD.

Correlators of the octet baryons in the hot pion gas are studied in the framework of the QCD sum rule. The condensates appearing in the OPE side of the correlators become T-dependent through the interaction with thermal pions. We present an explicit demonstration that the $O(T^2)$-dependence of the condensates is completely compensated by the change of the pole residue and the $\pi + B \rightarrow B'$ scattering effect in the spectral functions. Therefore the baryon masses ar...

We consider an extension of the one-nucleon sector of baryon chiral perturbation theory beyond the low-energy region. The applicability of this approach for higher energies is restricted to small scattering angles, i.e. the kinematical region, where the quark structure of hadrons cannot be resolved. The main idea is to re-arrange the low-energy effective Lagrangian according to a new power counting and to exploit the freedom of the choice of the renormalization condition for ...

After a general introduction to the structure of effective field theories, the main ingredients of chiral perturbation theory are reviewed. Applications include the light quark mass ratios and pion-pion scattering to two-loop accuracy. In the pion-nucleon system, the linear sigma model is contrasted with chiral perturbation theory. The heavy-nucleon expansion is used to construct the effective pion-nucleon Lagrangian to third order in the low-energy expansion, with applicatio...

Fluctuations are included in a chiral nucleon-meson model within the framework of the functional renormalization group. The model, with parameters fitted to reproduce the nuclear liquid-gas phase transition, is used to study the phase diagram of QCD. We find good agreement with results from chiral effective field theory. Moreover, the results show a separation of the chemical freeze-out line and chiral symmetry restoration at large baryon chemical potentials.

We investigate the finite temperature behavior of the meson sector of an effective Lagrangian which describes nuclear matter. A method is developed for evaluating the logarithmic terms in the effective potential which involves expansion and resummation; the result is written in terms of the exponential integral. In the absence of explicit chiral symmetry breaking, a phase transition restores the symmetry at a temperature of 190 MeV; when the pion has a mass the transition is ...

The temperature dependence of the chiral condensate in isospin-symmetric nuclear matter at varying baryon density is investigated using thermal in-medium chiral effective field theory. This framework provides a realistic approach to the thermodynamics of the correlated nuclear many-body system and permits calculating systematically the pion-mass dependence of the free energy per particle. One- and two-pion exchange processes, $\Delta(1232)$-isobar excitations, Pauli blocking ...