A novel probe of chiral restoration in nuclear medium

TL;DR

This paper proposes an experimental method to investigate chiral symmetry restoration in nuclear matter by measuring the mass shift and width broadening of specific mesons, supported by QCD sum rule analysis predicting a 100 MeV attraction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel experimental approach using meson property measurements to probe chiral symmetry restoration, supported by theoretical QCD sum rule calculations.

Findings

QCD sum rule analysis predicts ~100 MeV mass attraction for $f_1(1285)$ in nuclear matter.

Proposed measurements of meson mass shifts can serve as indicators of chiral symmetry restoration.

The relation between chiral order parameters and meson correlation functions is discussed theoretically.

Abstract

We propose measuring the mass shift and width broadening of the $f_1(1285)$ meson together with those of the $\omega$ from a nuclear target as a means to experimentally probe the partial restoration of chiral symmetry inside the nuclear matter. The relation between the order parameter of chiral symmetry and the difference in the correlation functions of the $f_1(1285)$ current and the $\omega$ current is discussed in the limit where the disconnected diagrams are neglected. A QCD sum rule analysis of the $f_1(1285)$ meson mass leads to about 100 MeV attraction in nuclear matter, which can be probed in future experiments.