The nuclear liquid-gas transition in QCD

TL;DR

This paper uses functional QCD to estimate nuclear saturation density and binding energy, linking four-quark scattering data to nuclear liquid properties, and constructs an effective theory for the liquid-gas transition.

Contribution

It introduces a novel QCD-based approach to estimate nuclear matter properties and develops an effective theory for the liquid-gas transition from QCD correlation functions.

Findings

Estimated saturation density of 0.2 fm^{-3}

Upper bound for binding energy of 21.5 MeV

Constructed an effective low-energy theory for the liquid-gas transition

Abstract

We estimate the nuclear saturation density and the binding energy in a nuclear liquid from precision data on the coupling of the four-quark scattering vertex in the vector channel, computed within functional QCD. We show that this coupling is directly related to the density-density potential and the latter is used for the estimates. In a first qualitative computation we find a saturation density of 0.2 fm${}^{-3}$ and an upper bound for the binding energy of 21.5 MeV, in agreement with the empirical values of 0.16 fm${}^{-3}$ and 16 MeV, respectively. We also use the scattering vertex for constructing an emergent low-energy effective theory for the liquid gas transition from QCD correlation function, whose coupling parameters can be determined within QCD. As a first consistency check of this construction we estimate the in-medium reduction of the nucleon pole mass.