Catalysis of Dynamical Chiral Symmetry Breaking by Chiral Chemical Potential

TL;DR

This paper investigates how chiral chemical potential influences dynamical chiral symmetry breaking, showing it can act as a catalyst by creating conditions like a Fermi surface that promote symmetry breaking even with weak interactions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that chiral chemical potential can enhance or induce dynamical chiral symmetry breaking depending on interaction strength, revealing a catalytic role in the process.

Findings

Chiral chemical potential can induce symmetry breaking at weak interactions.

Fermi surface formation is key to the catalysis effect.

Chiral plasma becomes unstable and condenses at low temperatures.

Abstract

In this paper we study the properties of media with chiral imbalance parameterized by chiral chemical potential. It is shown that depending on the strength of interaction between constituents in the media the chiral chemical potential either creates or enhances dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Thus the chiral chemical potential plays a role of the catalyst of dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. Physically this effect results from the appearance of the Fermi surface and additional fermion states on this surface which take part in dynamical chiral symmetry breaking. An interesting conclusion which can be drawn is that at sufficiently small temperature chiral plasma is unstable with respect to condensation of Cooper pairs and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking even for vanishingly small interactions between constituents.