Variational approach to the inhomogeneous chiral phase in quark matter

TL;DR

This paper develops a variational method to analyze the inhomogeneous chiral phase in quark matter, effectively describing its phase diagram at finite temperature and density, including the effects of current quark mass.

Contribution

The study introduces a variational approach to comprehensively describe the inhomogeneous chiral phase in QCD, incorporating current mass effects across the entire phase diagram.

Findings

The framework accurately models the inhomogeneous phase region.

It successfully incorporates current mass effects.

The phase diagram is well described across temperature and density ranges.

Abstract

The inhomogeneous chiral phase is discussed in QCD at finite temperature and/or density. We study the phase diagram on the density-temperature plane by taking into account the effect of the current mass by a variational method. It is demonstrated that our framework well describes the inhomogeneous phase over the whole phase region.