Inhomogeneous phases in the quark-meson model with explicit chiral-symmetry breaking

Abstract

We investigate the existence of inhomogeneous chiral phases in the quark-meson model with explicit chiral-symmetry breaking. We find that the inhomogeneous region shrinks with increasing pion masses but survives for the physical value of m_pi. The instability towards inhomogeneous matter occurs in the scalar channel, while pseudoscalar modes are disfavored.

Comments: 14 pages, 5 figures, contains ancillary files with plot data; v2: figures and typos corrected, corresponds to published version in the EPJ ST Special Issue: Strong Correlations in Dense Matter Physics