Thermodynamics of dense hadronic matter in a parity doublet model

Understand

We study thermodynamics of nuclear matter in a two-flavored parity doublet model within the mean field approximation.

• Parameters of the model are chosen to reproduce correctly the properties of the nuclear ground state.
• The model predicts two phase transitions in nuclear matter, a liquid-gas phase transition at normal nuclear density and a chiral transition at higher density.
• At finite temperature the pion decay constant exhibits a considerable reduction at intermediate values of chemical potential, which is traced back to the presence of the liquid-gas transition, and approaches zero at higher chemical potential associated with the chiral symmetry restoration.