Nuclear chiral density wave in neutron stars?

Abstract

Anisotropic phases potentially play a role in the internal composition of neutron stars, the main laboratory for the phase structure of QCD at high baryon densities. We review the study of such a phase, the chiral density wave, within a phenomenological nucleon-meson model, including nucleonic vacuum fluctuations within a renormalization scheme recently developed. Neutron stars in this model and within our approximations either do not contain a chiral density wave core or they are too light to agree with observations.

Comments: 12 pages, 4 figures, contribution to proceedings of XQCD 2025, July 2-4; v2: small modifications to the text, matches published version