Approaching Stable Quark Matter

Understand

The determination of whether the ground state of baryon matter in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the ordinary nucleus or a quark matter state remains a long-standing question in physics.

• A critical parameter in this investigation is the bag parameter $B$, which quantifies the QCD vacuum energy and can be computed using nonperturbative methods such as Lattice QCD (LQCD).
• By combining the equation of state derived from perturbative QCD (pQCD) with the bag parameter to fit the LQCD-simulated data for isospin-dense matter, we address the stability of quark matter within the LQCD+pQCD framework.
• Our findings suggest that the current data imposes an upper bound on $B^{1/4} \lesssim 160$ MeV, approaching a conclusive statement on quark matter stability.