Speaker
Andreas Schmitt
(University of Southampton)
Description
Cold and dense QCD matter may break rotational invariance spontaneously. One candidate phase is the chiral density wave, which exhibits an anisotropic chiral condensate, and which is conjectured to occur in the vicinity of the quark-hadron transition. I will employ a nucleon-meson model that allows for a chiral phase transition to explore the possibility of a chiral density wave in nuclear matter and throughout the transition. Besides the simplest case of isospin-symmetric matter, I will discuss the fate of the chiral density wave under neutron star conditions. I will show that the chiral density wave is only favored for model parameters that result in very soft matter, too soft to allow for realistic neutron stars.
