Time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau approach to the dynamics of inhomogeneous chiral condensates in a nonlocal Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the real-time evolution of inhomogeneous chiral condensates using a nonlocal Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model and Ginzburg-Landau equations, revealing metastable structures relevant to heavy-ion collisions.

Contribution

It introduces a time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau framework combined with a nonlocal chiral model to study inhomogeneous condensate dynamics.

Findings

Metastable inhomogeneous structures form during evolution.

Lifetimes of structures are comparable to heavy-ion collision timescales.

Phase diagram mapped as a function of temperature and chemical potential.

Abstract

We study the dynamics of inhomogeneous scalar and pseudoscalar chiral order parameters within the framework of the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equations. We utilize a nonlocal chiral quark model to obtain the phase diagram of the model as function of temperature and baryon chemical potential and study the formation of metastable spatial domains of matter where the order parameters acquire a spatial modulation in the course their dynamical evolution. We found that, before reaching the expected equilibrium homogeneous state, both scalar and pseudoscalar chiral condensates go through long-lived metastable inhomogeneous structures. For different initial configurations of the order parameters, the lifetimes of the inhomogeneous structures are compared to timescales in a relativistic heavy-ion collision.