Covering the Fermi Surface with Patches of Quarkyonic Chiral Spirals

TL;DR

This paper proposes that in cold, dense quark matter with many colors, the ground state forms a complex pattern of Quarkyonic Chiral Spirals covering the Fermi surface, breaking symmetries and featuring gapless excitations.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of a patchwork of Quarkyonic Chiral Spirals covering the Fermi surface in dense quark matter, revealing a novel symmetry-breaking ground state.

Findings

Fermi surface is covered with patches of QCSs as density increases

The ground state spontaneously breaks chiral and translational symmetries

Low energy excitations are gapless, described by Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten models

Abstract

We argue that in cold, dense quark matter, in the limit of a large number of colors the ground state is unstable with respect to creation of a complicated Quarkyonic Chiral Spiral (QCS) state, in which both chiral and translational symmetries are spontaneously broken. The entire Fermi surface is covered with patches of QCSs, whose number increases as the quark density does. The low energy excitations are gapless, given by Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten model plus transverse kinetic terms localized about different patches.