Approaching the conformal limit of quark matter with different chemical potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates how various chemical potentials and conditions affect the approach of quark matter to the conformal limit at zero temperature, including effects of masses, leptons, and symmetry energy.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of different chemical potentials and constraints on the conformal behavior of quark matter, including the first study of symmetry energy's approach to the conformal limit.

Findings

Chemical potentials influence the rate at which quark matter approaches the conformal limit.

Non-zero masses and leptons significantly affect the conformal behavior.

Symmetry energy approaches the conformal limit under certain conditions.

Abstract

We study in detail the influence of different chemical potentials (baryon, charged, strange, and neutrino) on how and how fast a free gas of quarks in the zero-temperature limit reaches the conformal limit. We discuss the influence of non-zero masses, the inclusion of leptons, and different constraints, such as charge neutrality, zero-net strangeness, and fixed lepton fraction. We also investigate for the first time how the symmetry energy of the system under some of these conditions approaches the conformal limit. Finally, we briefly discuss what kind of corrections are expected from perturbative QCD as one goes away from the conformal limit.