Nuclear medium meson structures from the Schwinger proper-time Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model

Abstract

In this paper, we report the results of our study on the nuclear medium modifications of the meson electromagnetic form factors in the framework of the Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model with the help of the Schwinger proper-time regularization scheme to tame the loop divergence and simulate the effect of QCD confinement. In our current approach, the meson structure and nuclear medium are constructed in the same NJL model at the quark level. We examine the free-space and in-medium charge radii of kaon and pion, the spacelike elastic electromagnetic form factors of kaon and pion, and their quark-sector form factors, which reflect their internal structures. By comparing our result to experimental data, we found that the free-space elastic electromagnetic form factors of the mesons are consistent with the data, while the in-medium elastic electromagnetic form factors of the mesons are found to decrease as the nuclear matter density increases, leading to a rise of meson charge radius, which is consistent with the prediction of other theoretical calculations. We also predict the axial nucleon coupling constant $g_A$ in nuclear medium computed via the Goldberger-Treiman relation (GTR), which is crucial for searching the neutrinoless double beta decay ($0\nu \beta \beta$).