Fluctuations in cool quark matter and the phase diagram of Quantum Chromodynamics

Abstract

We consider the phase diagram of hadronic matter as a function of temperature, T , and baryon chemical potential, mu. Currently the dominant paradigm is a line of first order transitions which ends at a critical endpoint. In this work we suggest that spatially inhomogenous phases are a generic feature of the hadronic phase diagram at nonzero mu and low T . Familiar examples are pion and kaon condensates. At higher densities, we argue that these condensates connect onto chiral spirals in a quarkyonic regime. Both of these phases exhibit the spontaneous breaking of a global U(1) symmetry and quasi-long range order, analogous to smectic liquid crystals. We argue that there is a continuous line of first order transitions which separate spatially inhomogenous from homogenous phases, where the latter can be either a hadronic phase or a quark-gluon plasma. While mean field theory predicts that there is a Lifshitz point along this line of first order transitions, in three spatial dimensions strong infrared fluctuations wash out any Lifshitz point. Using known results from inhomogenous polymers, we suggest that instead there is a Lifshitz regime. Non-perturbative effects are large in this regime, where the momentum dependent terms for the propagators of pions and associated modes are dominated not by terms quadratic in momenta, but quartic. Fluctuations in a Lifshitz regime may be directly relevant to the collisions of heavy ions at (relatively) low energies, sqrt(s)/A : 1 to 20 GeV.

43 pages, 3 figures

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• Chiral soliton lattice phase in warm QCD
• Particle Interferometry in a Moat Regime
• Inhomogeneous phases in the quark-meson model with explicit chiral-symmetry breaking
• Absence of Landau-Peierls Instability in the Magnetic Dual Chiral Density Wave Phase of Dense QCD
• Chiral condensates for neutron stars in hadron-quark crossover: from a parity doublet nucleon model to an NJL quark model
• The Myriad Uses of Instantons
• Competition of inhomogeneous chiral phases and two-flavor color superconductivity in the NJL model
• Thermal quarks and gluon propagators in two-color dense QCD
• Phase transitions and resilience of the MDCDW phase at finite temperature and density
• The QCD moat regime and its real-time properties
• Structure formation during phase transitions in strongly interacting matter
• Universality driven analytic structure of QCD crossover: radius of convergence and QCD critical point
• When cold, dense quarks in 1+1 and 3+1 dimensions are not a Fermi liquid
• Feasibility of a Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov superfluid Fermi atomic gas
• Spatially oscillating correlation functions in $\left(2+1\right)$-dimensional four-fermion models: The mixing of scalar and vector modes at finite density
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• Isotropic Lifshitz Scaling in four dimensions
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• Low energy physics of interacting bosons with a moat spectrum, and the implications for condensed matter and cold nuclear matter
• Higher-derivative four-dimensional sine-Gordon model