Density resummation of perturbation series in a pion gas to leading order in chiral perturbation theory

Abstract

The mean field (MF) approximation for the pion matter, being equivalent to the leading ChPT order, involves no dynamical loops and, if self-consistent, produces finite renormalizations only. The weight factor of the Haar measure of the pion fields, entering the path integral, generates an effective Lagrangian $δ\mathcal{L}_{H}$ which is generally singular in the continuum limit. There exists one parameterization of the pion fields only, for which the weight factor is equal to unity and $δ\mathcal{L}_{H}=0$, respectively. This unique parameterization ensures selfconsistency of the MF approximation. We use it to calculate thermal Green functions of the pion gas in the MF approximation as a power series over the temperature. The Borel transforms of thermal averages of a function $\mathcal{J}(χ^αχ^α)$ of the pion fields $χ^α$ with respect to the scalar pion density are found to be $\frac{2}{\sqrtπ}\mathcal{J}(4t)$. The perturbation series over the scalar pion density for basic characteristics of the pion matter such as the pion propagator, the pion optical potential, the scalar quark condensate $<{\bar{q}}q>$, the in-medium pion decay constant ${\tilde{F}}$, and the equation of state of pion matter appear to be asymptotic ones. These series are summed up using the contour-improved Borel resummation method. The quark scalar condensate decreases smoothly until $T_{max}\simeq 310$ MeV. The temperature $T_{max}$ is the maximum temperature admissible for thermalized non-linear sigma model at zero pion chemical potentials. The estimate of $T_{max}$ is above the chemical freeze-out temperature $T\simeq 170$ MeV at RHIC and above the phase transition to two-flavor quark matter $T_{c} \simeq 175$ MeV, predicted by lattice gauge theories.

Replaced with revised and extended version. Results are compared to lattice gauge theories. 16 pages REVTeX, 13 eps figures