Chiral-scale effective field theory for dense and thermal systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new power counting scheme called chiral-scale density counting (CSDC) for applying chiral-scale effective field theory to nuclear matter at finite densities and temperatures, capturing key properties and emphasizing the importance of quantum corrections.

Contribution

The paper develops and applies the CSDC rules to nuclear matter, providing a systematic framework for studying dense and thermal systems within chiral-scale effective field theory.

Findings

CSDC captures properties of symmetric nuclear matter around saturation density.

The critical temperature of liquid-gas phase transition is estimated.

Quantum corrections are shown to be crucial across a wide density range.

Abstract

We established a new power counting scheme, chiral-scale density counting (CSDC) rules, for the application of the chiral-scale effective field theory to nuclear matter at finite densities and temperatures. Within this framework, the free fermion gas is at the leading order, while one-boson-exchange interactions appear at the next-to-leading order, and the multi-meson couplings are at higher orders. Then, we applied the CSDC rules to study the nuclear matter properties, and estimated the valid regions of the CSDC rules. It was found that the zero temperature symmetric nuclear matter properties around saturation density and the critical temperature of liquid-gas phase transition can be captured by an appropriate choice of CSDC orders, and the results beyond these regions are align with the chiral nuclear force. Moreover, the evolution of scale symmetry was found to be consistent with previous studies. The results of this work indicate that the quantum corrections may be crucial in the studies of nuclear matter in a wide density region.