How Many Phases Meet at the Chiral Critical Point?

We explore the phase diagram of Nambu—Jona-Lasinio-type models near the chiral critical point allowing for phases with spatially inhomogeneous chiral condensates. In the chiral limit it turns out that the region in the mean-field phase diagram where those phases are energetically preferred very gene...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Nickel, Marcel Dominik Johannes
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: American Physical Society 2010
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/51370
Description
Summary:We explore the phase diagram of Nambu—Jona-Lasinio-type models near the chiral critical point allowing for phases with spatially inhomogeneous chiral condensates. In the chiral limit it turns out that the region in the mean-field phase diagram where those phases are energetically preferred very generically reaches out to the chiral critical point. The preferred inhomogeneous ground state in this vicinity possibly resembles a lattice of domain wall solitons. This raises the question of their relevance for the phase diagram of QCD.