Speaker
Description
Chiral perturbation theory in the presence of the chiral anomaly predicts a so-called chiral soliton lattice in the presence of a magnetic field and a baryon chemical potential. This phase becomes unstable with respect to charged pion condensation if the magnetic field is further increased. I will point out that this instability bears a striking resemblance to the well-known instability at the second critical magnetic field of a type-II superconductor. This analogy is exploited to analytically construct an inhomogeneous superconducting phase of charged pions in coexistence with a supercurrent of neutral pions. The resulting phase is energetically favored over the chiral soliton lattice and exhibits spatially oscillating topological baryon number in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field.
