Scalar susceptibilities and four-quark condensates in the meson gas within Chiral Perturbation Theory

TL;DR

This paper investigates four-quark condensates and scalar susceptibilities in a meson gas using finite temperature Chiral Perturbation Theory, revealing the limitations of factorization as an order parameter and providing detailed results including kaon and eta interactions.

Contribution

It extends previous ChPT analyses to NNLO for SU(3), including kaon and eta effects, and compares ChPT with virial expansion, emphasizing the role of the sigma resonance and chiral restoration.

Findings

Factorization breaks at finite temperature, invalidating it as an order parameter.

The sigma resonance's effect is largely canceled by scalar isospin two interactions.

The main contribution to scalar susceptibility comes from the rho(770) resonance.

Abstract

We analyze the properties of four-quark condensates and scalar susceptibilities in the meson gas, within finite temperature Chiral Perturbation Theory (ChPT). The breaking of the factorization hypothesis does not allow for a finite four-quark condensate and its use as an order parameter, except in the chiral limit. This is rigorously obtained within ChPT and is therefore a model-independent result. Factorization only holds formally in the large $N_c$ limit and breaks up at finite temperature even in the chiral limit. Nevertheless, the factorization breaking terms are precisely those needed to yield a finite scalar susceptibility, deeply connected to chiral symmetry restoration. Actually, we provide the full result for the SU(3) quark condensate to NNLO in ChPT, thus extending previous results to include kaon and eta interactions. This allows to check the effect of those corrections compared to previous approaches and the uncertainties due to low-energy constants. We provide a detailed analysis of scalar susceptibilities in the SU(3) meson gas, including a comparison between the pure ChPT approach and the virial expansion, where the unitarization of pion scattering is crucial to achieve a more reliable prediction. Through the analysis of the interactions within this approach, we have found that the role of the $\sigma$ resonance is largely canceled with the scalar isospin two channel interaction, leaving the $\rho(770)$ as the main contribution. Special attention is paid to the evolution towards chiral restoration, as well as to the comparison with recent lattice analysis.