Negative-parity nucleon excited state in nuclear matter

TL;DR

This study investigates how the spectral functions of nucleons and their negative parity excited states change in nuclear matter using QCD sum rules and MEM, revealing density-dependent modifications in residues and effective masses.

Contribution

It applies QCD sum rules combined with the maximum entropy method to analyze in-medium spectral functions of negative parity nucleon states, providing new insights into their density dependence.

Findings

Residue of the nucleon ground state decreases with density.

Residue of the negative parity excited state increases slightly with density.

Nucleon effective mass decreases as density increases.

Abstract

Spectral functions of the nucleon and its negative parity excited state in nuclear matter are studied using QCD sum rules and the maximum entropy method (MEM). It is found that in-medium modifications of the spectral functions are attributed mainly to density dependencies of the $\langle \bar{q}q \rangle $ and $\langle q^{\dagger}q \rangle $ condensates. The MEM reproduces the lowest-energy peaks of both the positive and negative parity nucleon states at finite density up to $\rho \sim \rho_N$ (normal nuclear matter density). As the density grows, the residue of the nucleon ground state decreases gradually while the residue of the lowest negative parity excited state increases slightly. On the other hand, the positions of the peaks, which correspond to the total energies of these states, are almost density independent for both parity states. The density dependencies of the effective masses and vector self-energies are also extracted by assuming the mean-field green functions for the peak states. We find that, as the density increases, the nucleon effective mass decreases while the vector self-energy increases. The density dependence of these quantities for the negative parity state on the other hand turns out to be relatively weak.