Variational approach to the inhomogeneous chiral phase in quark matter

Abstract

The inhomogeneous chiral phase is discussed in QCD at finite temperature and/or density. We study the phase diagram on the density-temperature plane by taking into account the effect of the current mass by a variational method. It is demonstrated that our framework well describes the inhomogeneous phase over the whole phase region.

Comments: 6 pages,3 figures