Gluon Condensation Signature in the GeV Gamma-Ray Spectra of Pulsars

The accumulation of gluons inside nucleons, i.e., the gluon condensation, may lead to a characteristic broken power-law gamma-ray spectrum in high-energy nucleon collisions. Here we show that the observed spectra of at least 25 sources in the second Fermi Large Area Telescope Catalog of Gamma-ray Pu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2023-03
Main Authors: Ze-Cheng Zou, Yong-Feng, Huang, Cheng-Ming, Li, He-Rui, Zheng, Zhu, Wei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Eavesdropping
Gamma emission
Gamma rays
Gluons
Hadrons
Nucleons
Power law
Pulsars
Spectra
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Summary:The accumulation of gluons inside nucleons, i.e., the gluon condensation, may lead to a characteristic broken power-law gamma-ray spectrum in high-energy nucleon collisions. Here we show that the observed spectra of at least 25 sources in the second Fermi Large Area Telescope Catalog of Gamma-ray Pulsars can be well fitted by such a broken power-law function that has only four free parameters. It strongly indicates that the gamma-ray emission from these pulsars is of hadronic origin, but with gluon condensation inside hadrons. It is well known that the quark-gluon distribution in a free nucleon is different from that in a bound nucleon. This work exposes the nuclear \(A\) dependence of the gluon condensation effect, where \(A\) refers to the baryon number. Our study reveals the gluon condensation under the condition of \(A\to\infty\), which may open a new window for eavesdropping on the structure of compact stars on the subnuclear level.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2303.05741