We study the effect of the chiral symmetry restoration (CSR) on heavy-ion collisions observables in the energy range $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=3-20 GeV within the Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD) transport approach. The PHSD includes the deconfinement phase transition as well as essential aspects of CSR in the dense and hot hadronic medium, which are incorporated in the Schwinger mechanism for the hadronic particle production. We adopt different parametrizations of the nuclear equation of state from the non-linear $σ-ω$ model, which enter in the computation of the quark scalar density for the CSR mechanism, in order to estimate the uncertainty in our calculations.
We review the relationship between the pion decay constant $f_π$, the chiral symmetry restoration temperature $T_c$ and the phenomenology of low energy chiral symmetry breaking in view of the recent confirmation of the existence of a sigma meson with a mass of 600-700 MeV.
We study the spectrum of heavy-light mesons within a model with linear instantaneous confining potential. The single-quark Green function and spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry are obtained from the Schwinger-Dyson (gap) equation. For the meson spectrum we derive a Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE). We solve thiss equation numerically in the heavy-light limit and obtain effective restoration of chiral and $U(1)_A$ symmetries at large spins.
Complex poles of the unitarized pi-pi scattering amplitude in nuclear matter are studied. Partial restoration of chiral symmetry is modeled by the decrease of in-medium pion decay constant f*_{pi}. For large chiral restoration (f*_{pi}/f_{pi} << 1), 2nd sheet poles in the scalar (sigma) and the vector (rho) mesons are both dictated by the Lambert W function and show universal softening as f*_{pi} decreases. In-medium pi-pi cross section receives substantial contribution from the soft mode and exhibits a large enhancement in low-energy region. Fate of this universality for small chiral restorat…
The chiral phase transition at high temperature and/or density is interpreted in terms of Georgi's vector limit. We discuss three cases as possible support for this scenario: Quark-number susceptibility, cool kaons in heavy-ion process and an instanton-molecule picture for chiral restoration. Both the notion of ``mended symmetry" and the Georgi vector limit are suggested to be relevant in nuclear physics of dense matter.
In the mean-field approximation we study the chiral soliton within the linear sigma model in a thermal vacuum. The chiral soliton equations with different boundary conditions are solved at finite temperatures and densities. The solitons are discussed before and after the chiral restoration. We find that the system has soliton solutions even after the chiral restoration and they are very different from those before the chiral restoration, which indicates that the quarks are still bounded after the chiral restoration.
We review recent theoretical progress in low-mass dilepton production at CERN-SpS energies. Various hadronic approaches to calculate the vector correlator in hot/dense hadronic matter are discussed and confronted with each other. Possible consequences for the nature of chiral restoration are indicated.
Chiral symmetry imposes some constrains on hadron correlation functions in dense medium. These constraints imply a certain general structure of the two- and three-point correlation functions of chiral partners and lead to the effect of mixing arising from the interaction of the long-ranged nuclear pions with corresponding interpolating currents. It reflects the phenomena of partial restoration of chiral symmetry. We consider soft pion corrections for quark condensates and several possible pairs of chiral partners for both mesons and nucleons and analyse their mixing patterns. We explored both …
Spectral enhancement near the 2m_π threshold in the I=J=0 channel in nuclei is shown to be a distinct signal of the partial restoration of chiral symmetry. The relevance of this phenomenon with the possible detection of 2π^{0} and 2γin hadron-nucleus and photo-nucleus reactions is discussed.
We report on recent work relating the medium effects observed in dilepton spectra in heavy-ion collisions to potential signals of chiral symmetry restoration. The key connection remains the approach to spectral function degeneracy between the vector-isovector channel with its chiral partner, the axialvector-isovector channel. Several approaches are discussed to elaborate this connection, namely QCD and Weinberg sum rules with input for chiral order parameters from lattice QCD, and chiral hadronic theory to directly evaluate the medium effects of the axialvector channel and the pertinent pion d…
We investigate chiral-restoration patterns of QCD for N_{c}=3 and N_{f}=2 at finite temperature (T) and zero quark-chemical potential beyond the chiral limit, indicating the explicit chiral-symmetry breaking. To this end, we employ the instanton-vacuum configuration for the flavor SU(2) sector and the Harrington-Shepard caloron for modifying relevant instanton parameters as functions of T. The meson-loop corrections (MLC), which correspond to 1/N_{c} corrections, are also taken into account to reproduce appropriate m_{q} dependences of chiral order parameters. We compute chiral condensate as a…
We investigate the effect of chiral phase transition on the pentaquark $Θ^+$ mass and width at one-loop level of $NΘ^+K$ coupling at finite temperature and density. The behavior of the mass, especially the width in hadronic medium is dominated by the characteristics of chiral symmetry restoration at high temperature and high density. The mass and width shifts of positive-parity $Θ^+$ are much larger than that of negative-parity one, which may be helpful to determine the parity of $Θ^+$ in high energy nuclear collisions.
Chiral restoration phase transition in hot and/or dense hadronic matter is discussed in terms of the BR scaling based on chiral symmetry and scale anomaly of QCD. The precise connection between the scalar field that figures in the trace anomaly and the sigma field that figures in the linear $σ$ model is established. It is suggested that in hot and/or dense medium, the nonlinear $σ$ model linearizes with the help of a dilaton to a linear $σ$ model with medium-renormalized constants. The relevance of Georgi's vector symmetry and/or Weinberg's ``mended symmetry" in chiral restoration is pointed o…
We show that both the linear and the non-linear chiral models give an enhancement of the pi-pi cross section near the 2pi threshold in the scalar-iso-scalar (I=J=0) channel in nuclear matter. The reduction of the chiral condensate, i.e., the partial chiral restoration in nuclear matter, is responsible for the enhancement in both cases. We extract an effective 4pi-nucleon vertex which is responsible for the enhancement but has not been considered in the non-liear models for in-medium pi-pi interaction. Relation of this vertex and a next-to-leading order terms in the heavy-baryon chiral lagrangi…
We propose a simple explanation for the connection between chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement in QCD at high temperature. In the Higgs description of the QCD vacuum both spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking and effective gluon masses are generated by the condensate of a color octet quark-antiquark pair. The transition to the high temperature state proceeds by the melting of this condensate. Quarks and gluons become (approximately) massless at the same critical temperature. For instanton-dominated effective multiquark interactions and three light quarks with equal mass we find a firs…
The sigma-meson, which is at best a broad resonance in the vacuum, may suffer a substantial red-shift and appear as a soft and narrow collective mode at finite temperature and baryon densities. The physics behind this softening phenomena and its relation to the partial restoration of chiral symmetry are discussed. Possible experiments in laboratory to test the idea are also summarized.
The temperature ($T$) dependence of the axion mass is predicted for $T$'s up to $\sim 2.3 \times$ the chiral restoration temperature of QCD. The axion is related to the $U_A(1)$ anomaly. The squared axion mass $m_a(T)^2$ is, modulo the presently undetermined scale of spontaneous breaking of Peccei-Quinn symmetry $f_a$ (squared), equal to QCD topological susceptibility $χ(T)$ for all $T$. We obtain $χ(T)$ by using quark condensates calculated in two effective Dyson-Schwinger models of nonperturbative QCD. They exhibit the correct chiral behavior, including the dynamical breaking of chiral symme…
We study the effect of the chiral phase transition on pion production in hot hadronic matter. The phase of restored chiral symmetry is characterized by the appearance of the scalar $σ$-meson as a chiral partner of the pion as well as by the degeneracy of the vector and axial-vector mesons. We find rapid thermal and chemical equilibration of these degrees of freedom in the symmetric phase. Provided that the chiral transition temperature is not considerably high, the presence of a chirally symmetric phase will result in $\sim 1.6$ times more thermal pions in the final state.
Chiral symmetry restoration at nonzero temperature is studied in the framework of the O(4) linear sigma model and the U(N_f)_r x U(N_f)_l linear sigma model with N_f=2,3, and 4 quark flavors. We investigate the temperature dependence of the masses of the scalar and pseudoscalar mesons, and the non-strange, strange, and charm condensates within the Hartree approximation as derived from the Cornwall-Jackiw-Tomboulis formalism. We find that the masses of the non-strange and strange mesons at nonzero temperature depend sensitively on the particular symmetry of the model and the number of light qua…
Partial restoration in nuclear matter of the chiral symmetry of QCD is discussed together with some of its possible signals. Estimates of corrections to the leading, linear dependence of the quark condensate are found to be small, implying a significant reduction of that condensate in matter. The importance of the pion cloud for the scalar quark density of a single nucleon indicates a close connection between chiral symmetry restoration and the attractive two-pion exchange interaction between nucleons. This force is sufficiently long-ranged that nucleons in nuclear matter will feel a significa…
At large N_c, cold nuclear matter is expected to form a crystal and thus spontaneously break translational symmetry. The description of chiral symmetry breaking and translational symmetry breaking can become intertwined. Here, the focus is on aspects of chiral symmetry breaking and its possible restoration that are by construction independent of the nature of translational symmetry breaking---namely spatial averages of chiral order parameters. A system will be considered to be chirally restored provided all spatially-averaged chiral order parameters are zero. A critical question is whether chi…
We argue that a decrease of the chiral scalar meson mass is responsible for re-creation of $Ψ'$ from $J/Ψ$ in ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions. This causes the charmonium yields to freeze out at temperatures close to the chiral symmetry restoration temperature $T_c$. As a result $Ψ'/Ψ$ may serve as a thermometer for $T_c$ itself. Results in a detailed reaction model support the conjecture. They show good agreement with recent data of NA38 and NA50 for $J/Ψ$ and $Ψ'$ production in S on U and Pb on Pb collisions.
The contribution of nucleons to the quark condensate in nuclear matter includes a piece of first order in $m_π$, arising from the contribution of low-momentum virtual pions to the $πN$ sigma commutator. Chiral symmetry requires that no term of this order appears in the $NN$ interaction. The mass of a nucleon in matter thus cannot depend in any simple way on the quark condensate alone. More generally, pieces of the quark condensate that arise from low-momentum pions should not be associated with partial restoration of chiral symmetry.
We study chiral symmetry restoration by analyzing thermal properties of QCD's (pseudo-)Goldstone bosons, especially the pion. The meson properties are obtained from the spectral densities of mesonic imaginary-time correlation functions. To obtain the correlation functions, we solve the Dyson-Schwinger equations and the inhomogeneous Bethe-Salpeter equations in the leading symmetry-preserving rainbow-ladder approximation. In the chiral limit, the pion and its partner sigma degenerate at the critical temperature $T_c$. At $T \gtrsim T_c$, it is found that the pion rapidly dissociates, which sign…
Using a rather complete description of the in-medium $ρ$ spectral function - being constrained by various independent experimental information - we calculate pertinent dilepton production rates from hot and dense hadronic matter. The strong broadening of the $ρ$ resonance entails a reminiscence to perturbative $q\bar q$ annihilation rates in the vicinity of the phase boundary. The application to dilepton observables in Pb(158AGeV)+Au collisions - incorporating recent information on the hadro-chemical composition at CERN-SpS energies - essentially supports the broadening scenario. Possible impl…
The effective restoration of $SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R$ and $U(1)_A$ chiral symmetries of QCD in excited hadrons is reviewed. While the low-lying hadron spectrum is mostly shaped by the spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry, in the high-lying hadrons the role of the quark condensate of the vacuum becomes negligible and the chiral symmetry is effectively restored. This implies that the mass generation mechanisms in the low- and high-lying hadrons are essentially different. The fundamental origin of this phenomenon is a suppression of quark quantum loop effects in high-lying hadrons relative to …
Chiral thermodynamics of charmed mesons is formulated at finite temperature within a $2+1+1$-flavored effective Lagrangian incorporating heavy quark symmetry. The charmed-meson mean fields act as an extra source which breaks the chiral symmetry explicitly. This leads to effective interactions between the light and heavy-light mesons, which intrinsically depend on temperature. Effective masses of the scalar and pseudoscalar charmed-mesons tend to approach each other as increasing temperature, so that the splitting between the chiral partners is reduced. These chiral splittings are shown to be l…
The effect of quark anomalous magnetic moment (AMM) to chiral restoration and deconfinement phase transitions under magnetic fields is investigated in a Pauli-Villars regularized PNJL model. A linear-in-$B$ term for quark anomalous magnetic moment is introduced to the Lagrangian density of our model, and it plays the role of inverse catalysis to the phase transitions. With fixed magnetic field, the critical temperature decreases with quark AMM. When fixing quark AMM, the critical temperature increases with magnetic field for a small quark AMM, but decreases with magnetic field for a large quar…
In quantum systems with large $n$ (radial quantum number) or large angular momentum the semiclassical (WKB) approximation is valid. A physical content of the semiclassical approximation is that the quantum fluctuations effects are suppressed and vanish asymptotically. The chiral as well as $U(1)_A$ breakings in QCD is a result of quantum fluctuations. Hence these breakings must be absent (suppressed) high in the spectrum and the spectrum of high-lying hadrons must exhibit symmetries of the classical QCD Lagrangian.
Medium modifications of the electromagnetic spectral function in hadronic and quark-gluon matter are reviewed. A strong broadening of the $ρ$ meson, which dominates the spectral function in the low-mass regime, is quantitatively consistent with dilepton excess spectra measured in photoproduction off cold nuclei (CLAS/JLab) and in fixed-target ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions (NA45,NA60/CERN-SPS). The large excess observed by PHENIX at RHIC remains unexplained to date, but is most likely not due to emission from the Quark-Gluon Plasma. Connections to thermal lattice QCD promise progress i…
We study the structural change of the vector spectral function and integrated production rates of dileptons in the presence of the chiral mixing induced exclusively at finite density. The mixing produces multiple bumps and peaks around the vacuum masses of the $ρ, ω$ and $ϕ$ resonances in the spectral function. The arising modification becomes pronounced when the mass difference between parity partners decreases. In particular, the emergent enhancement around the vacuum $ϕ$ meson in the production rates serves as an excellent signature of the partially-restored chiral symmetry in heavy-ion col…
We investigate the in-medium masses of a $\bar{D} (0^-)$ meson and a $\bar{D}_0^* (0^+)$ meson and spectral functions for $\bar{D}$ and $\bar{D}_0^*$ meson channels in nuclear matter. These mesons are introduced as chiral partner in the chiral symmetry broken vacuum, hence they are useful to explore the partial restoration of the broken chiral symmetry in nuclear matter. We consider the linear sigma model to describe the chiral symmetry breaking. Our study shows that the loop corrections to $\bar{D}$ and $\bar{D}_0^*$ meson masses provide a smaller mass splitting at finite density than that in…
This paper is devoted to the evaluation of the pionic scalar density at finite temperature and baryonic density. We express the latter effect in terms of the nuclear response evaluated in the random phase approxima- tion. We discuss the density and temperature evolution of the pionic density which governs the quark condensate evolution. Numerical evalua- tions are performed.
We investigate the chiral restoration at finite temperature $(T)$ under the strong external magnetic field $\vec{B}=B_{0}\hat{z}$ of the SU(2) light-flavor QCD matter. We employ the instanton-liquid QCD vacuum configuration accompanied with the linear Schwinger method for inducing the magnetic field. The Harrington-Shepard caloron solution is used to modify the instanton parameters, i.e. the average instanton size $(\barρ)$ and inter-instanton distance $(\bar{R})$, as functions of $T$. In addition, we include the meson-loop corrections (MLC) as the large-$N_{c}$ corrections because they are cr…
We study patterns of chiral symmetry breaking at zero temperature and its subsequent restoration at nonzero temperature within the $SU(3)_{r} \times SU(3)_{\ell}$ linear sigma model. Gap equations for the masses of the scalar and pseudoscalar mesons and the non-strange and strange quark condensates are systematically derived in the Hartree approximation via the Cornwall-Jackiw-Tomboulis formalism. In the chiral limit, the chiral symmetry restoring transition is found to be first order, as predicted by universality arguments. Taking the experimental values for the meson masses, however, the tra…
We shed light upon the eta' mass in nuclear matter in the context of partial restoration of chiral symmetry, pointing out that the U_{A}(1) anomaly effects causes the eta'-eta mass difference necessarily through the chiral symmetry breaking. As a consequence, it is expected that the eta' mass is reduced by order of 100 MeV in nuclear matter where partial restoration of chiral symmetry takes place. The discussion given here is based on Ref. [1].
We study the restoration of chiral symmetry in linear sigma models with two quark flavors. The models taken into consideration have a U(2)_L x U(2)_R and an O(4) internal symmetry. The physical mesons of these models are sigma, pion, eta and a_0 where the latter two are not present in the O(4) model. Including two-loop contributions through sunset graphs we calculate the temperature behavior of the order parameter and the masses for explicit chiral symmetry breaking and in the chiral limit. Decay threshold effects introduced by the sunset graphs alter the temperature dependence of the condensa…
We pursue the idea of assessing chiral restoration via in-medium modifications of hadronic spectral functions of chiral partners. The usefulness of sum rules in this endeavor is illustrated, focusing on the vector and axial-vector channels. We first present an update on constructing quantitative results for pertinent vacuum spectral functions. These spectral functions serve as a basis upon which the in-medium spectral functions can be constructed. A striking feature of our analysis of the vacuum spectral functions is the need to include excited resonances, dictated by satisfying the Weinberg-t…
It has recently been suggested that the observed structure of parity doublets, seen in the spectrum of highly excited baryons, may be due to the effective restoration of chiral symmetry for these states. This chiral symmetry restoration high in the spectrum is consistent with the concept of quark-hadron duality. Moreover, if QCD dynamics implies the linear Regge trajectories for highly excited baryons, then the MacDowell symmetry requires the parity doubling to appear, which shows that linear Regge trajectories and chiral symmetry restoration are well compatible. On the contrary, in the low-en…
Some topics are introduced on possible evidences of chiral restoration in nuclei and related ones. The topics include the $σ$-mesonic mode in nuclei, the vector mesons in a nuclear matter, deeply bound pionic and Kaonic nuclei with a discussion on the nature of $Λ(1405)$. Other related topics are briefly mentioned. An emphasis is put on that phenomena even in finite nuclei with normal and sub-normal nuclear density, as will be explored in the new project in GSI and possibly in J-PARC, are interesting for physics of finite-density QCD.
We review efforts to describe the approach to chiral symmetry restoration in neutron matter from the low-energy realization of QCD, chiral effective field theory.
We investigate modifications of mass and decay width of $N^*(1535)$ in nuclear matter in a chiral symmetric way. The nucleon and $N^*(1535)$ are introduced by a parity doublet model, and nuclear matter is constructed by one-loop diagrams of the nucleon and $N^*(1535)$. The decay width of $N^*(1535)$ is studied respecting chiral symmetry. Our calculations show that the partial width of $Γ_{N^*\to Nπ}$ is slightly broadened by a collisional broadening, and that of $Γ_{N^*\to Nη}$ is drastically suppressed at density. As a result, the total decay width $Γ_{\rm tot}$ gets small at density. These m…
Based on an equivparticle model, we investigate the in-medium quark condensate in neutron stars. Carrying out a Taylor expansion of the nuclear binding energy to the order of $ρ^3$, we obtain a series of EOSs for neutron star matter, which are confronted with the latest nuclear and astrophysical constraints. The in-medium quark condensate is then extracted from the constrained properties of neutron star matter, which decreases non-linearly with density. However, the chiral symmetry is only partially restored with non-vanishing quark condensates, which may vanish at a density that is out of rea…
It is shown that an enhancement in the spectral function near 2$m_π$ threshold in the I=J=0 channel is a good signal of the partial restoration of chiral symmetry in nuclear medium. Several experiments are discussed to detect the enhancement, which uses hadron-nucleus and photo-nucleus reactions.
It is argued that an appearance of the near parity doublets in the upper part of the light baryon spectrum is an evidence for the chiral symmetry restoration in the regime where a typical momentum of quarks is around the chiral symmetry restoration scale. At high enough baryon excitation energy the nontrivial gap solution, which signals the chiral symmetry breaking regime, disappears and the chiral symmetry should be restored. Thus one observes a phase transition in the upper part of the light baryon spectrum. The average kinetic energy of the constituent quarks in this region is just around t…
We overview two interconnected topics: possible effective restoration of chiral symmetry in highly excited hadrons and possible existence of confined but chirally symmetric matter at low temperatures and high densities.
Exploiting the recent lattice results for the infrared gluon propagator with light dynamical quarks, we solve the gap equation for the quark propagator. We thus model the chiral symmetry breaking mechanism with increasing number of flavours and study confinement (intimately tied with the analytic properties of QCD Schwinger functions) order parameters. We obtain, with this approach, clear signals of chiral symmetry restoration and deconfinement when the number of light quark flavors exceeds a critical value of $N_f^c \approx 8 \pm 1$, in agreement with the state-of-the-art direct lattice analy…
We overview a possible mechanism for confining but chirally symmetric matter at low temperatures and large densities. As a new development we employ a diffused quark Fermi surface and show that such diffusion does not destroy possible existence of a confining but chirally symmetric matter at low temperatures and large density.
It is shown that in the large $N_c$ limit the light baryon spectrum exhibits the chiral restoration phase transition at high enough excitation energy. Such a phase transition is evidenced by the systematical parity doublets observed in the upper part of $N$ and $Δ$ spectra.
The thermal and nonthermal pion production by sigma decay and its relation with chiral symmetry restoration in a hot and dense matter are investigated. The nonthermal decay into pions of sigma mesons which are popularly produced in chiral symmetric phase leads to a low-momentum pion enhancement as a possible signature of chiral phase transition at finite temperature and density.
We summarize the status of electromagnetic probes of strongly interacting matter produced in relativistic heavy-ion collisions at CERN-SPS with respect to indications of chiral symmetry restoration. Explorative results for studying the open charm dynamics at BNL-RHIC are presented.
In this Addendum to our recent paper, Phys. Rev. D 77, 054027 (2008), we point out that a chiral restoration phase transition in a quarkyonic matter at low temperatures is of second order within a manifestly confining and chirally symmetric large $N_c$ model. This result is qualitatively different as compared to NJL and NJL-like models that are not confining and might have some implications for the existence or nonexistence of the critical end point in the QCD phase diagram.
The imposition of Dirichlet boundary conditions in lattice computations obstructs the formation of a chiral condensate. We use chiral perturbation theory and meson models to address the effect of a Dirichlet boundary on chiral symmetry breaking. While pions are the longest-range modes in QCD, the restoration of chiral symmetry due to a boundary is shown not to depend upon the pion Compton wavelength but rather on that of the sigma meson. Power-law finite size corrections are exposed, and require prohibitively large lattices to overcome. We further speculate on the frustration of the chiral con…
We compare axial charges of excited nucleons, as predicted by the chiral symmetry restoration picture, with the traditional, moderately successful for the ground-state baryons SU(6) symmetry. The axial charges of excited nucleons can (and will) be measured in lattice QCD simulations, and comparison of the lattice results with the two different symmetry schemes will give an insight on the origins of the excited hadron masses as well as on interrelations of chiral symmetry and confinement.
Based on QCD sum rules we explore the consequences of a pure chiral restoration scenario for the rho meson, where all chiral symmetry breaking condensates are dropped whereas the chirally symmetric condensates remain at their vacuum values. This pure chiral restoration scenario causes the drop of the rho spectral moment by about 120 MeV. The complementarity of mass shift and broadening is discussed. A simple parametrization of the rho spectral function leads to a width of about 600 MeV if no shift of the peak position is assumed.
Restoration of chiral and $U(1)_A$ symmetries in excited hadrons is reviewed. Implications of the OPE as well as of the semiclassical expansion for this phenomenon are discussed. A solvable model of the 't Hooft type in 3+1 dimensions is presented, which demonstrates a fast restoration of both chiral and $U(1)_A$ symmetries at larger spins and radial excitations.
Chiral symmetry restoration in a dense medium is to some extent a consequence of the nuclear pion cloud. These pions induce a mixing of the axial and vector current contributions in the axial and vector correlators. We discuss their influence on hadron masses and investigate the signal produced by the remaining contribution associated with chiral symmetry restoration. Using the quark-meson coupling model we find that the latter is associated with the reduction of hadron masses.
