The chiral condensate in neutron matter

Understand

We calculate the chiral condensate in neutron matter at zero temperature based on nuclear forces derived within chiral effective field theory.

• Two-, three- and four-nucleon interactions are included consistently to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) of the chiral expansion.
• We find that the interaction contributions lead to a modest increase of the condensate, thus impeding the restoration of chiral symmetry in dense matter and making a chiral phase transition in neutron-rich matter unlikely for densities that are not significantly higher than nuclear saturation density.