Abstract
What happens to the QCD vacuum when a time-periodic circularly polarized laser field with a sufficiently large intensity and frequency is applied? Based on the Floquet formalism for periodically driven systems and the systematic low-energy effective theory of QCD, we show that for a sufficiently large frequency and above a critical intensity, the QCD vacuum is unstable against the chiral soliton lattice of pions; a crystalline structure of topological solitons that spontaneously breaks parity and continuous translational symmetries. Our work would pave the way for novel "Floquet vacuum engineering."
Highlights
The quantum vacuum has rich structures, such as quark confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and Higgs condensation
Exploring its possible phase transitions under extreme conditions, which could have occurred in the early Universe for example, is one of the important questions in high-energy physics
The maximum intensity of the laser is still limited experimentally at the moment, one can ask, as a matter of principle, what happens to the QCD vacuum when a time-periodic circularly polarized laser with a sufficiently large intensity and frequency is applied. We address this question by applying the Floquet theory to the QCD vacuum
Summary
The quantum vacuum has rich structures, such as quark confinement, chiral symmetry breaking, and Higgs condensation. Lee called “vacuum engineering” [1] As one such conventional way, relativistic heavy-ion collisions have been used to study the phase structure of QCD [2,3]. According to Floquet theory, the nonequilibrium quantum many-body dynamics of a time-dependent Hamiltonian can be described by a time-independent effective Hamiltonian, where quasiequilibrium states can appear emergently. This is the concept of Floquet engineering [4,5]. Systematic low-energy effective theory, we show that the QCD vacuum is unstable against the chiral soliton lattice (CSL) of pions; a crystalline structure of topological solitons with spontaneous breaking of parity and continuous translational symmetries.
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