Study of pion condensate in nuclear matter based on a Parity Doublet Model

Abstract

In this work, we investigate the possibility of pion condensate in isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter within a parity doublet model at zero temperature, treating the baryon and isospin chemical potentials as independent variables. We include the $σ$, $π$, $ω$, and $ρ$ mesons and determine their mean fields from the gap equations. We introduce a novel subtraction scheme to calculate the thermodynamic potential in the no-sea approximation, in which the effective isospin chemical potential is retained in the subtraction term to remove the divergence. We find that the presence of baryons suppresses pion condensate, and that transition to the pion condensation phase is of second order. We further find that the phase boundary depends systematically on the chiral-invariant mass $m_0$: a smaller $m_0$ requires a larger critical isospin chemical potential for pion condensate. The presence of pion condensate also shifts the nuclear Liquid-Gas phase boundary toward larger baryon chemical potentials. Finally we study the existence of pion condensation phase in neutron star matter and find that pion condensate is unlikely to occur.