Dualities and inhomogeneous phases in dense quark matter with chiral and isospin imbalances in the framework of effective model

Abstract

Abstract It has been shown in [15, 70] in the framework of Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with the assumption of spatially homogeneous condensates that in the large-N c limit (N c is the number of quark colours) there exist three dual symmetries of the thermodynamic potential, which describes dense quark matter with chiral and isospin imbalances. The main duality is between the chiral symmetry breaking and the charged pion condensation phenomena. There have been a lot of studies and hints that the ground state could be characterized by spatially inhomogeneous condensates, so the question arises if duality is a rather deep property of the phase structure or just accidental property in the homogeneous case. In this paper we have shown that even if the phase diagram contains phases with spatially inhomogeneous condensates, it still possesses the property of this main duality. Two other dual symmetries are not realized in the theory if it is investigated within an inhomogeneous approach to a ground state. Based on various previously studied aspects of the QCD phase diagram of dense isospin asymmetric matter with possible inhomogeneous condensates, in the present paper a unified picture and full phase diagram of dense quark matter with isospin imbalance have been assembled. Acting on this diagram by a dual transformation, we obtained, in the framework of an approach with spatially inhomogeneous condensates and without any calculations, a full phase diagram of chirally asymmetric dense medium. This example shows that the duality is not just entertaining mathematical property but an instrument with very high predictivity power. The obtained phase diagram is quite rich and contains various spatially inhomogeneous phases.