Color-superconductivity and inhomogeneous chiral symmetry breaking in isospin-asymmetric quark matter

Abstract

We investigate the effects of isospin asymmetry on the competition between color-superconductivity and inhomogeneous chiral symmetry breaking in dense two-flavor quark matter using an extended Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model. We confirm the appearance of a coexistence window where chiral symmetry is inhomogeneously broken and a nonzero spatially homogeneous diquark gap is present, consistently with previous works, and show that such a phase survives at nonzero isospin chemical potentials. We also discuss how the model phase structure becomes modified as large isospin asymmetries are considered.