Quark, pion and axial condensates in three-flavor finite isospin chiral perturbation theory

TL;DR

This paper computes various quark and pion condensates in three-flavor chiral perturbation theory under finite isospin chemical potential, showing good agreement with lattice QCD and highlighting the importance of next-to-leading order effects.

Contribution

It extends three-flavor chiral perturbation theory to include NLO corrections for condensates under finite isospin chemical potential, mapping to two-flavor results and comparing with lattice data.

Findings

Light quark, pion, and axial condensates agree well with lattice QCD.

Including NLO effects improves the theoretical predictions.

Effective potential mapping simplifies three-flavor to two-flavor analysis.

Abstract

We calculate the light quark condensate, the strange quark condensate, the pion condensate, and the axial condensate in three-flavor chiral perturbation theory ($\chi$PT) in the presence of an isospin chemical potential at next-to-leading order at zero temperature. It is shown that the three-flavor $\chi$PT effective potential and condensates can be mapped onto two-flavor $\chi$PT ones by integrating out mesons with strange quark content (kaons and eta), with renormalized couplings. We compare the results for the light quark and pion condensates at finite pseudoscalar source with ($2+1$)-flavor lattice QCD, and we also compare the axial condensate at zero pseudoscalar and axial sources with lattice QCD data. We find that the light quark, pion, and axial condensates are in very good agreement with lattice data. There is an overall improvement by including NLO effects.