Speaker
Description
Strongly interacting matter in large magnetic fields occurs in heavy-ion collisions and neutron stars and is of theoretical interest for the phase structure of QCD. It was previously found that a so-called Chiral Soliton Lattice is formed at sufficiently large magnetic fields and baryon chemical potentials due to the chiral anomaly. Using chiral perturbation theory and methods from ordinary type-II superconductivity I will discuss how the known instability of the Chiral Soliton Lattice results in a transition to a 3D crystalline structure. This structure is an inhomogeneous condensate of neutral and charged pions and thus a superconductor with spatially modulated magnetic field and, via the axial anomaly, spatially modulated baryon number. I will also speculate what this new phase implies for the QCD phase structure, in particular a possible liquid-solid transition in nuclear matter.
