Hadrons, Superconductor Vortices, and Cosmological Constant

Abstract

We explore the roles of the trace anomaly in several hadron properties. We derive the scale invariant expression for the pressure from the gravitational form factors (GFF) of QCD which results in consistent results for the mass and rest energy from the GFF and those from the trace and the Hamiltonian of the energy-momentum tensor (EMT) operators. It is shown that the energy-equilibrium correspondence of hadrons infers an equation of state where the trace anomaly matrix element, emerging from the glue condensate in the vacuum, gives a negative constant pressure that leads to confinement, much like the confinement mechanism for the vortices in type II superconductors where the negative constant pressure is due to the cost of depleting the superconducting condensate. We also note that both the trace anomaly in the QCD energy-momentum tensor and the cosmological constant in Einstein's equation are associated with the metric term which contributes to both energy and pressure. Their difference in terms of the role the pressure plays is discussed. Finally, we note that a lattice calculation of the trace anomaly distribution in the pion has addressed a question about the trace anomaly contribution to the pion mass and suggests that there might be a connection between the conformal symmetry breaking and chiral symmetry breaking in this case.