Generic features of the phase transition in cold and dense quark matter

TL;DR

This paper explores the characteristics of phase transitions in cold, dense quark matter using an effective model approach, highlighting the role of the saturation curve in understanding transition order and inhomogeneity effects.

Contribution

It introduces a method to analyze phase transitions via the saturation curve, applicable even without explicit ground state solutions, and discusses the impact of inhomogeneity and vector interactions.

Findings

The saturation curve helps infer the nature of phase transitions.

Inclusion of inhomogeneity affects the transition order.

Vector interactions influence the phase transition characteristics.

Abstract

We investigate the phase transition in cold and dense quark matter in an intuitive way that shares common features of the effective model approaches. We first express the quasi-particle contribution to the thermodynamic potential with the dynamical mass M and then discuss how we can understand the possible first-order phase transition with and without the vector interaction from the saturation curve on the plane of the energy per particle and the density. We next extend our analysis including inhomogeneity and discuss the relation between the order of the phase transition and the saturation curve. We emphasize that the saturation curve is useful to infer qualitative nature of the phase transition even without knowing the explicit solution of the ground state.