Quarks and Compact Stars (QCS)
Oct. 20-22, 2014, KIAA at Peking University, Beijing - P. R. China


Invited Talk

Inhomogeneous chiral phases in two-flavor quark matter

Hiroaki Abuki

Keio University

Abstract: The possibility of inhomogeneous realizations of chiral symmetry breaking in quark matter has been extensively studied by several authors. Most of study concentrate on the ideal situation where equal numbers of up and down quarks are populated in the system. However, in a realistic bulk system such as realized in compact stars, down quark density is almost twice as large as up quark density to the charge neutrality constraint. Here we assume the existence of the Lifshitz point (LP) in the QCD phase diagram, and study the effect of isospin mismatch on the LP and the phase structure in its neighborhood. To this end, we derive systematically the generalized Ginzburg-Landau (gGL) potential expanded up to the sixth order in order parameters and isospin chemical potential. Using the derived gGL potential, we show that, going down in density from high density quark matter, the system might go through a particular kind of inhomogeneous charged pion condensate before forming a solitonic lattice of chiral condensate.