Quarkyonic Effective Field Theory, Quark-Nucleon Duality and Ghosts

TL;DR

This paper develops an effective field theory for quarkyonic matter that incorporates quark, nucleon, and ghost fields to address over-counting issues, enabling a unified description of nucleonic matter and quark-nucleon duality.

Contribution

It introduces a novel field theoretical framework that includes ghost fields to reconcile quark and nucleon degrees of freedom in quarkyonic matter.

Findings

The theory reproduces nucleonic matter phenomenology.

It allows for chiral symmetry restoration.

It demonstrates quark-nucleon duality through ghost fields.

Abstract

We present a field theoretical description of quarkyonic matter consisting of quark, nucleon and ghost fields coupling to mesonic degrees of freedom. The ghosts are present to cancel over-counting of nucleon states that are Pauli blocked by the quark Fermi sea. Such a theory becomes an effective field theory of nucleons at low baryon density, and as such will reproduce nucleonic matter phenomenology. This theory can accommodate chiral symmetry restoration and the dynamical generation of a shell of nucleons at the Fermi surface. It is valid for finite temperature and density. In such a theory, quark-nucleon duality is accomplished by inclusion of ghost fields so that the nucleons extra degrees of freedom, that are beyond those of quarks, are compensated by the ghost fields.