Density-Induced Hadron-Quark Crossover via the Formation of Cooper Triples

Abstract

We discuss the hadron--quark crossover accompanied by the formation of Cooper triples (three-body counterpart of Cooper pairs) by analogy with the Bose--Einstein condensate to Bardeen--Cooper--Schrieffer crossover in two-component fermionic systems. Such a crossover is different from a phase transition, which often involves symmetry breaking. We calculate the in-medium three-body energy from the three-body $T$-matrix with a phenomenological three-body force characterizing a bound hadronic state in vacuum. With increasing density, the hadronic bound-state pole smoothly undergoes a crossover toward the Cooper triple phase where the in-medium three-body clusters coexist with the quark Fermi sea. The relation to the quarkyonic matter model can also be found in a natural manner.