Volume 336 - XIII Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum (Confinement2018) - F: Nuclear and Astroparticle Physics
Pion condensation and the QCD phase diagram at finite isospin density
J.O. Andersen,* P. Adhikari, P. Kneschke
*corresponding author
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: 2019 September 12
Published on: 2019 September 26
Abstract
We use the Polyakov-loop extended two-flavor quark-meson model as a low-energy effective model for QCD to study 1) the possibility of inhomogeneous chiral condensates and its competition with a homogeneous pion condensate in the $\mu$--$\mu_I$ plane at $T=0$ and 2) the phase diagram in the $\mu_I$--$T$ plane. In the $\mu$--$\mu_I$ plane, we find that an inhomogeneous chiral condensate only exists for pion masses lower that 37.1 MeV and does not coexist with a homogeneous pion condensate. In the $\mu_I$--$T$ plane, we find that the phase transition to a Bose-condensed phase is of second order for all values of $\mu_I$ and we find that there is no pion condensation for temperatures larger than approximately 187 MeV.
The chiral critical line joins the critical line for pion condensation at a point, whose position depends on the Polyakov-loop potential and the sigma mass. For larger values of $\mu_I$ these curves are on top of each other. The deconfinement line enters smoothly the phase with the broken $O(2)$ symmetry. We compare our results with recent lattice simulations and find overall good agreement.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.336.0197
Open Access