Chiral Limit of Nuclear Physics

Abstract

We study nuclear physics in the chiral limit ($m_u$, $m_d=0$) in which the pion mass vanishes. We find that the deuteron mass is changed little, but that P--wave nucleon--nucleon scattering volumes are infinite. This motivates an investigation of the possibilities that there could be a two--nucleon ${}^3{P}_0$ bound state, and that the nuclear matter ground state is likely to be a condensed state of nucleons paired to those quantum numbers. However, the short distance repulsion in the nucleon--nucleon potential is not affected by the chiral limit and prevents such new chiral possibilities. Thus the chiral limit physics of nuclei is very similar to that of nature. Using the chiral limit to simplify QCD sum rule calculations of nuclear matter properties seems to be a reasonable approximation.

9 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Phys. Rev C

References in corpus (2)

• An accurate nucleon-nucleon potential with charge-independence breaking
• QCD Sum Rules and Applications to Nuclear Physics

Cited by in corpus (15)

• Few-Nucleon Forces and Systems in Chiral Effective Field Theory
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis: from precision cosmology to fundamental physics
• Towards a Perturbative Theory of Nuclear Forces
• Nuclear forces in the chiral limit
• The Quark-Mass Dependence of Two-Nucleon Systems
• Variation of Fundamental Couplings and Nuclear Forces
• Renormalization of the Deuteron with One Pion Exchange
• Low-energy theorems for nucleon-nucleon scattering at unphysical pion masses
• Perturbative Effective Field Theory at Finite Density
• A New Approach to Physics of Nuclei
• Variations of nuclear binding with quark masses
• Pi in the Sky: Neutron Stars with Exceptionally Light QCD Axions
• Nuclear matter in the chiral limit and the in-medium chiral condensate
• Impulse approximation in nuclear pion production reactions: absence of a one-body operator
• Charge Symmetry Breaking and Nuclear Pion Production Reactions