1209.0080 (Kie Sang Jeong et al.)

Nuclear Symmetry Energy from QCD sum rules    [PDF]

Kie Sang Jeong, Su Houng Lee

We calculate the nucleon self-energies in an isospin asymmetric nuclear matter using QCD sum rules. Taking the difference of these for the neutron and proton enables us to express the potential part of the nuclear symmetry energy in terms of local operators. We find that the scalar (vector) self energy part gives negative (positive) contribution to the nuclear symmetry energy which are consistent with the results from relativistic mean field theories. Moreover, we find that an important contribution to the negative contribution of the scalar self energy comes from the twist-4 matrix elements, whose leading density dependence can be extracted from deep inelastic scattering experiments. This suggests that twist-4 contribution partly mimics the exchange of the $\delta$ meson and that it constitutes an essential part in the origin of the nuclear symmetry energy from QCD. Our result also extends an early success of QCD sum rule method in understanding the symmetric nuclear matter in terms of QCD variables to the asymmetric nuclear matter case.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.0080