OZI violating eight-quark interactions as a thermometer for chiral transitions

This work is a follow-up of our recent observation that in the SU(3) flavor limit with vanishing current quark masses the temperature for the chiral transition is substantially reduced by adding eight-quark interactions to the Nambu - Jona-Lasinio Lagrangian with U_A(1) breaking. Here we generalize the case to realistic light and strange quark masses and confirm our prior result. Additionally, we demonstrate that depending on the strength of OZI violating eight-quark interactions, the system undergoes either a rapid crossover or a first order phase transition. The meson mass spectra of the low lying pseudoscalars and scalars at T=0 are not sensitive to the difference in the parameter settings that correspond to these two alternatives, except for the singlet-octet mixing scalar channels, mainly the sigma meson.Comment: LaTeX, 5 pages, 3 figure

Eight-quark interactions as a chiral thermometer

A NJL Lagrangian extended to six and eight quark interactions is applied to study temperature effects (SU(3) flavor limit, massless case), and (realistic massive case). The transition temperature can be considerably reduced as compared to the standard approach, in accordance with recent lattice calculations. The mesonic spectra built on the spontaneously broken vacuum induced by the 't Hooft interaction strength, as opposed to the commonly considered case driven by the four-quark coupling, undergoes a rapid crossover to the unbroken phase, with a slope and at a temperature which is regulated by the strength of the OZI violating eight-quark interactions. This strength can be adjusted in consonance with the four-quark coupling and leaves the spectra unchanged, except for the sigma meson mass, which decreases. A first order transition behavior is also a possible solution within the present approach.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, prepared for the proceedings of Quark Matter 2008 - 20th International Conference on Ultra-Relativistic Nucleus Nucleus Collisions, February 4-10, Jaipur (India

Path integral bosonization of the 't Hooft determinant: fluctuations and multiple vacua

The 't Hooft six quark flavor mixing interaction (N_f=3) is bosonized by the path integral method. The considered complete Lagrangian is constructed on the basis of the combined 't Hooft and U(3)X U(3) extended chiral four fermion Nambu-Jona-Lasinio interactions. The method of the steepest descents is used to derive the effective mesonic Lagrangian. Additionally to the known lowest order stationary phase (SP) result of Reinhardt and Alkofer we obtain the contribution from the small quantum fluctuations of bosonic configurations around their stationary phase trajectories. It affects the vacuum state of hadrons at low energies: whereas without the inclusion of quantum fluctuations the vacuum is uniquely defined for a fixed set of the model parameters, fluctuations give rise to multivalued solutions of the gap equations, marked at instances by drastic changes in the quark condensates. We derive the new gap equations and analyse them in comparison with known results. We classify the solutions according to the number of extrema they may accomodate. We find up to four solutions in the 0<m_(u,s)<3$ GeV region.Comment: RevTex, 9 pages, 8 figures, slightly modified introduction, one added reference and added acknowledgements, version accepted in Phys. Lett.

Long distance expansion for the NJL model with SU(3) and U_A(1) breaking

This work is a follow up of recent investigations, where we study the implications of a generalized heat kernel expansion, constructed to incorporate non-perturbatively the effects of a non-commutative quark mass matrix in a fully covariant way at each order of the expansion. As underlying Lagrangian we use the Nambu -- Jona-Lasinio model of QCD, with $SU_f(3)$ and $U_A(1)$ breaking, the latter generated by the 't Hooft flavour determinant interaction. The associated bosonized Lagrangian is derived in leading stationary phase approximation (SPA) and up to second order in the generalized heat kernel expansion. Its symmetry breaking pattern is shown to have a complex structure, involving all powers of the mesonic fields allowed by symmetry. The considered Lagrangian yields a reliable playground for the study of the implications of symmetry and vacuum structure on the mesonic spectra, which we evaluate for the scalar and pseudoscalar meson nonets and compare with other approaches and experiment.Comment: LaTeX, 30 pages, added discussions and references, title change, version to appear in Nucl. Phys.

Lowering the critical temperature with eight-quark interactions

It is shown that eight-quark interactions, which are needed to stabilize the ground state of the combined three flavor Nambu -- Jona-Lasinio and 't Hooft Lagrangians, play also an important role in determining the critical temperature at which transitions occur from the dynamically broken chiral phase to the symmetric phase.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Implications of a New Effective Chiral Meson Lagrangian

Based on a recently derived effective chiral meson Lagrangian from the extended SU(2)\otimes SU(2) Nambu -- Jona-Lasinio (ENJL) model, in the linear realization of chiral symmetry, we extract to leading order in the 1/N_c expansion all associated relevant three-point functions \rho \to \pi\pi, \sigma \to \pi\pi, a_1 \to \rho\pi, a_1 \to \sigma\pi, as well as the amplitude for \pi\pi scattering. We discuss the formal differences of these amplitudes as compared with those derived in the literature and calculate the associated decay widths and scattering parameters. The differences have two origins: i) new terms, which are proportional to the current quark mass and arise from taking the correct NJL vacuum from the first steps in a proper-time expansion, are present in the Lagrangian; ii) an implemented chiral covariant treatment of the diagonalization in the pseudoscalar - axialvector sector induces new couplings between three or more mesonic fields. Both effects have been derived from the chiral Ward Takahashi identities, which are fully taken into account at each order of the proper-time expansion.Comment: Plain LaTex, 15 page

Charge transfer and weak bonding between molecular oxygen and graphene zigzag edges at low temperatures

Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) study of air-physisorbed defective carbon nano-onions evidences in favor of microwave assisted formation of weakly-bound paramagnetic complexes comprising negatively-charged O2- ions and edge carbon atoms carrying pi-electronic spins. These complexes being located on the graphene edges are stable at low temperatures but irreversibly dissociate at temperatures above 50-60 K. These EPR findings are justified by density functional theory (DFT) calculations demonstrating transfer of an electron from the zigzag edge of graphene-like material to oxygen molecule physisorbed on the graphene sheet edge. This charge transfer causes changing the spin state of the adsorbed oxygen molecule from S = 1 to S = 1/2 one. DFT calculations show significant changes of adsorption energy of oxygen molecule and robustness of the charge transfer to variations of the graphene-like substrate morphology (flat and corrugated mono- and bi-layered graphene) as well as edges passivation. The presence of H- and COOH- terminated edge carbon sites with such corrugated substrate morphology allows formation of ZE-O2- paramagnetic complexes characterized by small (<50 meV) binding energies and also explains their irreversible dissociation as revealed by EPR.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, accepted in Carbon journa

Aspects of U_A(1) breaking in the Nambu and Jona-Lasinio model

The six-quark instanton induced 't Hooft interaction, which breaks the unwanted U_A (1) symmetry of QCD, is a source of perturbative corrections to the leading order result formed by the four-quark forces with the U_L(3)X U_R(3) chiral symmetry. A detailed quantitative calculation is carried out to bosonize the model by the functional integral method. We concentrate our efforts on finding ways to integrate out the auxiliary bosonic variables. The functional integral over these variables cannot be evaluated exactly. We show that the modified stationary phase approach leads to a resummation within the perturbative series and calculate the integral in the ``two-loop'' approximation. The result is a correction to the effective mesonic Lagrangian which may be important for the low-energy spectrum and dynamics of the scalar and pseudoscalar nonets.Comment: 42 pages, 3 figures; concluding section and references adde

Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking by a magnetic field and multi-quark interactions

Catalysis of dynamical symmetry breaking by a constant magnetic field in (3+1) dimensions is considered. We use the three flavour Nambu -- Jona-Lasinio type model with 't Hooft and eight-quark interaction terms. It is shown that the multi-quark interactions introduce new additional features to this phenomenon: (a) the local minimum of the effective potential catalyzed by the constant magnetic field is smoothed out with increasing strength of the field at the characteristic scale H~10^{19} G, (b) the multi-quark forces generate independently another local minimum associated with a larger dynamical fermion mass. This state may exist even for multi-quark interactions with a subcritical set of couplings, and is globally stable with respect to a further increase of the magnetic field.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, added discussion and references, version to appear in Phys.Lett.