2003/04/30 by Thomas D. Cohen · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Baryon #Baryon number #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Isospin #Nuclear physics #Nucleon #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Pion #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum chromodynamics #Quark #hep-lat #hep-ph #hep-th #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.91.032002
published as Phys.Rev.Lett. 91 (2003) 032002 · Four pages. Version to appear in print
arxiv created 2003/06/06 · openalex publication_date 2003/07/18 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The positivity of the integrand of certain Euclidean space functional integrals for two flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses implies that the free energy per unit volume for QCD with a baryon chemical potential mu(B) (and zero isospin chemical potential) is greater than the free energy with an isospin chemical potential mu(I)=(2 mu(B)/N(c)) (and zero baryon chemical potential). The same result applies to QCD with any number of heavy flavors in addition to the two light flavors so long as the chemical potential is understood as applying to the light quark contributions to the baryon number. This relation implies a bound on the nucleon mass: there exists a particle X in QCD (presumably the pion) such that M(N)> or =(N(c) m(X)/2 I(X)) where m(X) is the mass of the particle and I(X) is its isospin.