Zero point energy of composite particles: The medium effects

Abstract

We analyze the zero point energy of composite particles (or resonances) which are dynamically created from relativistic fermions. We compare the zero point energies in medium to the vacuum one, taking into account the medium modification of the constituent particles. Treating composite particles as if quasi-particles, their zero point energies contain the quadratic and logarithmic UV divergences even after the vacuum subtraction. The coefficients of these divergences come from the difference between the vacuum and in-medium fermion propagators. We argue that such apparent divergences can be cancelled by consistently using fermion propagators to compute the quasi-particle contributions as well as their interplay, provided that the self-energies of the constituents at large momenta approach to the vacuum ones sufficiently fast. In the case of quantum chromodynamics, mesons and baryons, which may be induced or destroyed by medium effects, yield the in-medium divergences in the zero point energies, but the divergences are assembled to cancel with those from the quark zero-point energy. This is particularly important for unified descriptions of hadronic and quark matter which may be smoothly connected by the quark-hadron continuity.