Chiral soliton lattice at next-to-leading order

TL;DR

This paper calculates the free energy of the chiral soliton lattice in QCD at next-to-leading order, extending previous work and providing insights into the phase diagram and magnetic properties of the system.

Contribution

It provides the first next-to-leading order computation of the free energy for the chiral soliton lattice in QCD, including the domain wall limit.

Findings

Validated the QCD phase diagram at moderate magnetic fields and temperatures.

Determined the magnetization of the domain wall and chiral soliton lattice at NLO.

Abstract

We compute the free energy of the chiral soliton lattice state in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at nonzero baryon chemical potential, temperature and external magnetic field at the next-to-leading order of chiral perturbation theory. This extends previous work where only a special limit of the chiral soliton lattice, the domain wall, was considered. Our results therefore serve as a consistency check of the previously established phase diagram of QCD at moderate magnetic fields and temperature and sub-nuclear baryon chemical potentials. Moreover, we use the result for the free energy to determine the magnetization carried by the domain wall and the chiral soliton lattice, both at the next-to-leading order.