Phase diagram of chiral quark matter: Fulde-Ferrell pairing from weak to strong coupling

Abstract

We calculate the phase diagram of two-flavor quark matter in the temperature-flavor asymmetry plane in the case where there are three competing phases: the homogeneous Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) phase, the unpaired phase, and a phase with broken spatial symmetry, which is here taken to be the counterpart of the Fulde-Ferrell (FF) phase in condensed matter physics. We show that the system belongs to the universality class of paramagnetic-ferromagnetic -helical systems. We vary the coupling constant of the theory, which is obtained from integrating out the gluonic degrees of freedom. In weak coupling, the FF phase is favored at arbitrary flavor asymmetries for sufficiently low temperatures; at intermediate coupling its occupancy domain is shifted towards larger asymmetries. Strong coupling features a new regime of an inhomogeneous FF state, which we identify with a current-carrying Bose-Einstein condensate of tightly bound up and down quarks. We analyze the occupation numbers and the Cooper-pair wave function and show that when the condensate momentum is orthogonal to the particle momentum the minority component contains a blocking region (breach) around the Fermi sphere in the weak-coupling limit, which engulfs more low-momentum modes as the coupling is increased, and eventually leads to a topological change in strong coupling, where the minority Fermi sphere contains either two occupied strips or an empty sphere. For non-orthogonal momenta, the blocking region is either reduced or extinct, i.e., no topological changes are observed.