EPJ A Highlight - Confirming the validity of the Silver-Blaze property for QCD at finite chemical potential

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Published on 06 November 2019

The properties of the theory of strong interactions, QCD, at finite chemical potential are of great interest for at least two reasons: (i) model studies suggest a potentially rich landscape of different phases with highly interesting analogies to those found in solid state physics; (ii) the resulting thermodynamic properties have far reaching consequences for the physics of neutron stars and neutron star mergers.

Investigating the properties of light scalar and pseudo-scalar quark-antiquark bound states at finite chemical potential by solving coupled sets of Dyson-Schwinger equations, the meson masses, wave functions, and decay constants are computed, as well as changes in the quark dressing functions for chemical potentials below the first-order chiral phase transition while tracing charge-conjugation parity breaking.

Eventually, we confirm the validity of the Silver-Blaze property: in observables all dependencies of colored quantities (propagators, wave-functions, etc.) on chemical potential cancel out and we observe constant masses and decay constants up to and into the coexistence region of the first-order chiral phase transition.