Non-Abelian chiral soliton lattice in rotating QCD matter: Nambu-Goldstone and excited modes

Abstract

The ground state of QCD with two flavors at a finite baryon chemical potential under rapid rotation is a chiral soliton lattice (CSL) of the η meson, consisting of a stack of sine-Gordon solitons carrying a baryon number, due to the anomalous coupling of the η meson to the rotation. In a large parameter region, the ground state becomes a non-Abelian CSL, in which due to the neutral pion condensation each η soliton decays into a pair of non-Abelian sine-Gordon solitons carrying S2 moduli originated from Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes localized around it, corresponding to the spontaneously broken vector symmetry SU(2)V. There, the S2 modes of neighboring solitons are anti-aligned, and these modes should propagate in the transverse direction of the lattice due to the interaction between the S2 modes of neighboring solitons. In this paper, we calculate excitations including gapless NG modes and excited modes around non-Abelian and Abelian (η) CSLs, and find three gapless NG modes with linear dispersion relations (type-A NG modes): two isospinons (S2 modes) and a phonon corresponding to the spontaneously broken vector SU(2)V and translational symmetries around the non-Abelian CSL, respectively, and only a phonon for the Abelian CSL because of the recovering SU(2)V. We also find in the deconfined phase that the dispersion relation of the isospinons becomes of the Dirac type, i.e. linear even at large momentum.

Baryons as vortexes on the η′ domain wall

“…The lower-spin baryons should be considered as skyrmions, which are soliton structures of pion fields, without η ′ field. To establish a connection between the ordinary skyrmion in 3+1 dimensions and the baryon on the domain wall for the multi-flavor case, it might be convenient to use the description of baby skyrmion although the direct relationship between baby skyrmions and our vortex remains unclear [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. We leave this to the future work.…”

“…In refs. [25,26], the authors have discovered that, owing to the anomalous coupling of the η ′ meson to rotation [27][28][29], the ground state of rapidly rotating two-flavor QCD matter forms a chiral soliton lattice (CSL), which can be either Abelian or non-Abelian [30]. Additionally, there exists a domain-wall baby-skyrmion phase located on the CSL.…”