Chiral condensates and size of the sigma term Original Research Article

The in-medium chiral condensate is studied with a new approach which has the advantage of no need for extra assumptions on the current mass derivatives of model parameters. It is shown that the pion–nucleon sigma term is 9/2 times the average current mass of light quarks, if quark confinement is linear. Considering both perturbative and non-perturbative interactions, the chiral condensate decreases monotonously with increasing densities, approaching to zero at about 4 fm−3.