Nuclear Matter from Effective Quark-Quark Interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates nuclear matter properties using a quark-meson model for nucleon interactions, employing many-body theory to account for correlations, and finds results consistent with phenomenological data, suggesting quark degrees of freedom reduce three-body force importance.

Contribution

It introduces a quark-meson model for nucleon interactions and applies many-body theory to accurately describe nuclear matter, highlighting the significance of three-hole line contributions.

Findings

Saturation point within phenomenological constraints

Non-negligible three-hole line contributions

Reproduces properties of three-nucleon systems

Abstract

We study neutron matter and symmetric nuclear matter with the quark-meson model for the two-nucleon interaction. The Bethe-Bruckner-Goldstone many-body theory is used to describe the correlations up to the three hole-line approximation with no extra parameters. At variance with other non-relativistic realistic interactions, the three hole-line contribution turns out to be non-negligible and to have a substantial saturation effect. The saturation point of nuclear matter, the compressibility, the symmetry energy and its slope are within the phenomenological constraints. Since the interaction also reproduces fairly well the properties of the three nucleon system, these results indicate that the explicit introduction of the quark degrees of freedom within the considered constituent quark model is expected to reduce the role of three-body forces.