In-medium properties of $D$ and $D^*$ mesons in magnetized isospin asymmetric nuclear matter
We investigate the impact of an external magnetic field on the in-medium properties of pseudoscalar ($D^0,D^+,D_s$) and vector ($D^{0*},D^{+*},D_{s}^{*}$) mesons in isospin asymmetric nuclear matter at finite temperature using a hybrid theoretical framework combining the chiral SU(3) quark mean-field (CQMF) model and the light-front quark model (LFQM). The medium-modified constituent quark masses, obtained from the CQMF model by including the magnetized Dirac sea contribution and anomalous magnetic moments of nucleons, are used as input to the LFQM calculations of meson masses, weak decay constants, and leading-twist distribution amplitudes. We further incorporate the Landau quantization of the charged mesons restricted to the lowest Landau level, while magnetic field induced pseudoscalar-vector mixing is taken into account for each $D$-$D^{*}$ doublet. We find that the external magnetic field enhances the effective masses and decay constants of both pseudoscalar and vector $D$ mesons by magnetic catalysis, while increasing baryon density generally induces an attractive mass shift and suppresses the decay constant and distribution amplitudes. The Landau level contribution further enhances the effective masses of the charged mesons, whereas the pseudoscalar-vector mixing produces a level repulsion, shifting the vector meson masses upward and the pseudoscalar meson masses downward. The interplay between magnetic field and density effects gives rise to a nontrivial medium behavior of heavy-light meson properties, with isospin asymmetry further inducing a small but systematic mass splitting across all the meson states considered. These results provide useful insights into heavy-flavor dynamics in strongly interacting matter and are relevant to ongoing and future studies at FAIR, NICA, and J-PARC.