Study of the effects of external imaginary electric field and chiral chemical potential on quark matter

TL;DR

This study investigates how imaginary electric fields and chiral chemical potentials influence quark matter, revealing their roles in enhancing chiral symmetry breaking and exhibiting non-monotonic behaviors, using lattice QCD simulations.

Contribution

It is the first to analyze the combined effects of imaginary electric fields and chiral chemical potential on quark matter using lattice QCD with dynamical fermions.

Findings

Both imaginary electric field and chiral chemical potential enhance chiral symmetry breaking.

Chiral condensation shows non-monotonic behavior at specific parameter values.

Polyakov loop behavior remains largely unaffected by chiral chemical potential.

Abstract

The behavior of quark matter with both external electric field and chiral chemical potential is theoretically and experimentally interesting to consider. In this paper, the case of simultaneous presence of imaginary electric field and chiral chemical potential is investigated using the lattice QCD approach with $N_f=1+1$ dynamical staggered fermions. We find that overall both the imaginary electric field and the chiral chemical potential can exacerbate chiral symmetry breaking, which is consistent with theoretical predictions. However we also find a non-monotonic behavior of chiral condensation at specific electric field strengths and chiral chemical potentials. In addition to this, we find that the behavior of Polyakov loop in the complex plane is not significantly affected by chiral chemical potential in the region of the parameters consider in this paper.