Energy Density Functional of Confined Quarks: an Improved Ansatz

2025/04/02 by Shukla, Udita, Lo, Pok Man
#FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2504.01814

Abstract

Density Functional Theory (DFT) is a robust framework for modeling interacting many-body systems, including the equation of state (EoS) of dense matter. Many models, however, rely on energy functionals based on assumptions that have not been rigorously validated. We critically analyze a commonly used ansatz for confinement, where the energy functional scales with density as U ∝ n^(2)/(3) . Our findings, derived from a systematic non-local energy functional, reveal that this scaling does not capture the dynamics of confinement. Instead, the energy functional evolves from n² at low densities to n at high densities, governed by an infrared cutoff. These results suggest that models relying on such assumptions should be revisited to ensure more reliable EoS construction.

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