Cooper triples in attractive three-component fermions: Implication for hadron-quark crossover

Abstract

We investigate many-body properties of equally populated three-component fermions with attractive three-body contact interaction in one dimension. A diagrammatic approach suggests the possible occurrence of Cooper triples at low temperature, which are three-body counterparts of Cooper pairs with a two-body attraction. We develop a minimal framework that bridges the crossover from tightly bound trimers to Cooper triples with increasing chemical potential and show how the formation of Cooper triples occurs in the grand-canonical phase diagram. Moreover, we argue that this nontrivial crossover is similar to the hadron-quark crossover proposed in dense matter. A coexistence of medium-induced triples and the underlying Fermi sea at positive chemical potential is analogous to quarkyonic matter consisting of baryonic excitations and the underlying quark Fermi sea. The comparison with the existing quantum Monte Carlo results implies that the emergence of these kinds of three-body states can be a microscopic origin of the peak of the sound velocity along the crossover.