Quarkyonic chiral spirals

We consider the formation of chiral density waves in Quarkyonic matter, which is a phase where cold, dense quarks experience confining forces. We model confinement following Gribov and Zwanziger, taking the gluon propagator, in Coulomb gauge and momentum space, as image. We assume that the number of colors, image, is large, and that the quark chemical potential, μ, is much larger than renormalization mass scale, image. To leading order in image and image, a gauge theory with image flavors of massless quarks in image dimensions naturally reduces to a gauge theory in image dimensions, with an enlarged flavor symmetry of image. Through an anomalous chiral rotation, in two dimensions a Fermi sea of massless quarks maps directly onto the corresponding theory in vacuum. A chiral condensate forms locally, and varies with the spatial position, z, as image. Following Schön and Thies, we term this two-dimensional pion condensate a (Quarkyonic) chiral spiral. Massive quarks also exhibit chiral spirals, with the magnitude of the oscillations decreasing smoothly with increasing mass. The power law correlations of the Wess–Zumino–Novikov–Witten model in image dimensions then generate strong infrared effects in image dimensions.