Competition of inhomogeneous chiral phases and two-flavor color superconductivity in the NJL model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phase competition between inhomogeneous chiral condensates and two-flavor color superconductivity in the NJL model, analyzing various condensate modulations and their impact on the phase diagram.

Contribution

It extends previous work by deriving dispersion relations for arbitrary inhomogeneous chiral condensates in the presence of a homogeneous 2SC phase, comparing different Ansätze.

Findings

Inhomogeneous chiral and 2SC phases can coexist depending on diquark coupling.

Decreasing diquark coupling favors inhomogeneous phases; increasing favors 2SC.

The real-kink crystal (RKC) Ansatz is energetically preferred over the chiral density wave (CDW).

Abstract

We study the phase structure of the two-flavor Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model in the chiral limit, extending a previous study of the competition of an inhomogeneous chiral phase and a two-flavor color-superconducting (2SC) phase [1, 2]. There, an analytic expression for the dispersion relations for quasiparticle excitations in the presence of both a particular inhomogeneous chiral condensate, the so-called chiral density wave (CDW), and a homogeneous 2SC condensate was found. In this work we show how to determine the dispersion relations for arbitrary modulations of the chiral condensate in the presence of a homogeneous 2SC condensate, if the dispersion relations in the absence of color superconductivity are known. In our calculations, we employ two different Ans\"atze for the inhomogeneous chiral condensate, the CDW as well as the real-kink crystal (RKC). Depending on the value of the diquark coupling we find a region of the phase diagram where the inhomogeneous chiral and the 2SC condensates coexist, confirming results of Refs. [1, 2]. Decreasing the diquark coupling favors the inhomogeneous phase over the coexistence phase. On the other hand, increasing the diquark coupling leads to a larger 2SC phase, while the inhomogeneous chiral and the coexistence phases become smaller. In agreement with previous studies the RKC Ansatz is energetically preferred over the CDW Ansatz. Both Ans\"atze lead to a qualitatively similar phase diagram, however the coexistence phase is smaller for the RKC Ansatz.