Biomedical subjects

Thomas D Cohen

Publications and source records attributed to Thomas D Cohen.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Phase separation and an upper bound for a generalized superfluid gap for cold fermi fluids in the unitary regime.

An upper bound is derived for Delta for a cold dilute fluid of equal amounts of two species of fermion in the unitary limit k(f)a--> infinity (where k(f) is the Fermi momentum, a is the scattering length, and Delta is a pairing energy: the difference in energy per particle between adding to the system a macroscopic number (but infinitesimal fraction) of particles of one species compared to adding equal numbers of both. The bound is delta < or =5/3 [2(2xi)(2/5)-(2xi)] where xi=epsilon/epsilon(FG), delta=2Delta/epsilon(FG); epsilon is the energy per particle and epsilon(FG) is the energy per particle of a noninteracting Fermi gas. If the bound is saturated, then systems with unequal densities of the two species will separate spatially into a superfluid phase with equal numbers of the two species and a normal phase with the excess. If the bound is not saturated, then Delta is the usual superfluid gap. If the superfluid gap exceeds the maximum allowed by the inequality, phase separation occurs.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2004

Large-Nc continuum reduction and the thermodynamics of QCD.

It is noted that if large-N(c) continuum reduction applies to an observable, then that observable is independent of temperature for all temperatures below some critical value. This fact, plus the fact that mesons and glueballs are weakly interacting at large N(c), is used as the basis for a derivation of large-N(c) continuum reduction for the chiral condensate. The structure of this derivation is quite general and can be extended to a wide class of observables.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

Functional integrals for QCD at nonzero chemical potential and zero density.

In a Euclidean space functional integral treatment of the free energy of QCD, a chemical potential enters only through the functional determinant of the Dirac operator which for any flavor is /D+m-mu(f)gamma(0) (where mu(f) is the chemical potential for the given flavor). Any nonzero mu alters all of the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator relative to the mu=0 value, leading to a naive expectation that the determinant is altered and which thereby alters the free energy. Phenomenologically, this does not occur at T=0 for sufficiently small mu, in contradiction to this naive expectation. The problem of how to understand this phenomenological behavior in terms of functional integrals is solved for the case of an isospin chemical through the study of the spectrum of the operator gamma(0)(/D+m). The case of the baryon chemical potential is briefly discussed.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

QCD inequalities for the nucleon mass and the free energy of baryonic matter.

The positivity of the integrand of certain Euclidean space functional integrals for two flavor QCD with degenerate quark masses implies that the free energy per unit volume for QCD with a baryon chemical potential mu(B) (and zero isospin chemical potential) is greater than the free energy with an isospin chemical potential mu(I)=(2 mu(B)/N(c)) (and zero baryon chemical potential). The same result applies to QCD with any number of heavy flavors in addition to the two light flavors so long as the chemical potential is understood as applying to the light quark contributions to the baryon number. This relation implies a bound on the nucleon mass: there exists a particle X in QCD (presumably the pion) such that M(N)> or =(N(c) m(X)/2 I(X)) where m(X) is the mass of the particle and I(X) is its isospin.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

New relations for excited baryons in large-N(c) QCD.

We show that excited baryons in large-N(c) QCD form multiplets, within which masses are first split at O(1/N(c)). The dominant couplings of resonances to various mesons are highly constrained: The N(1535) decays at leading 1/N(c) order exclusively to eta-N rather than pi-N, and vice versa for the N(1650). This multiplet structure is reproduced by a simple large-N(c) quark model, well studied in the literature, that describes resonances as single-quark excitations.

Journal Article↗