Narrow Results

Chiral symmetry breaking at finite baryon density is usually discussed in the context of quark matter, i.e. a system of deconfined quarks. Many systems like stable nuclei and neutron stars however have quarks confined within nucleons. In this paper we construct a Fermi sea of three-quark nucleon clusters and investigate the change of the quark condensate as a function of baryon density. We study the effect of quark clustering on the in-medium quark condensate and compare results with the traditional approach of modeling hadronic matter in terms of a Fermi sea of deconfined quarks.

Chiral monopoles are hedgehoglike structures in local chiral condensates in QCD. These monopoles are (i) made of quark and gluon fields; (ii) explicitly gauge-invariant; (iii) they carry quantized and conserved chromomagnetic charge. We argue that the chiral condensate vanishes in a core of the chiral monopole while the density of these monopoles increases with temperature wiping out the quark condensate in quark-gluon plasma. We suggest that the chiral monopoles are responsible for the chiral symmetry restoration in QCD. We also argue that the chiral monopoles are unlikely to be responsible for confinement of color. Thus, phenomena of the chiral symmetry restoration and the color deconfinement in QCD are not necessarily related to each other and the corresponding transitions may happen at different temperatures.

The chiral effective Lagrangian for pseudoscalar meson nonet including eight Goldstone bosons and a SU(3) singlet η₀ is constructed with the breaking effect of chiral symmetry in both quark condensate and quark mass differences taken into account. The mixing is discussed. By solving the mass equations of pseudoscalar mesons, the quark mass ratios are obtained and the quark condensate ratios are constrained in ranges. The mass split of π⁰-π^± is discussed.