Effect of Asymmetric Nuclear Medium on the Valence Quark Structure of the Kaons

TL;DR

This paper investigates how asymmetric nuclear medium affects the valence quark structure of kaons at zero and finite temperature, using a hybrid model to analyze modifications in decay constants, distribution amplitudes, and parton distributions.

Contribution

It introduces a combined light cone quark model and chiral SU(3) quark mean field approach to study medium effects on kaon properties, including isospin asymmetry and temperature impacts.

Findings

Baryonic density significantly alters kaon DAs and PDFs.

Temperature and isospin asymmetry have lesser effects compared to density.

In-medium DAs and PDFs are evolved to Q^2=16 GeV^2 for experimental comparison.

Abstract

The role of asymmetric nuclear medium on the properties of kaon is investigated at zero and finite temperature employing a hybrid approach integrating the light cone quark model (LCQM) and the chiral SU(3) quark mean field (CQMF) model. The in-medium quark masses are calculated within the CQMF model and are used as inputs to study the medium modifications in the kaon properties. In particular, we have analysed the impact of baryonic density, isospin asymmetry and temperature on the weak decay constant, distribution amplitudes (DAs) and parton quark distributions (PDFs) of valence quark structure of kaons. The effects of isospin asymmetry on the kaon doublet $K =\left(\begin{array}{c} K^{+} \\ K^{0} \end{array} \right)$ and antikaon doublet $\bar{K}$= ($K^-, \bar{K}^0$) are also studied. In order to compare with future experiments, we have also evolved the in-medium DAs and PDFs of kaons to $Q^2=16$ GeV$^2$. As compared to the temperature and isospin asymmetry, change in baryonic density of the nuclear medium makes more significant changes to the DAs and PDFs of kaons.