Chiral symmetry in matter

Abstract

Soft-pion theorems are used to show how chiral symmetry constrains the contributions of low-momentum pions to the quark condensate, the pion decay constant and hadron masses, all of which have been proposed as signals of partial restoration of chiral symmetry in matter. These have contributions of order T^2 for a pion gas or of order m_pi for cold nuclear matter, which have different coefficients in all three cases, showing that there are no simple relations between the changes to these quantities in matter. In particular, such contributions are absent from the masses of vector mesons and nucleons and so these masses cannot scale as any simple function of the quark condensate. More generally, pieces of the quark condensate that arise from low-momentum pions should not be associated with partial restoration of chiral symmetry.