Covering the Fermi Surface with Patches of Quarkyonic Chiral Spirals

Understand

We argue that in cold, dense quark matter, in the limit of a large number of colors the ground state is unstable with respect to creation of a complicated Quarkyonic Chiral Spiral (QCS) state, in which both chiral and translational symmetries are spontaneously broken.

• The entire Fermi surface is covered with patches of QCSs, whose number increases as the quark density does.
• The low energy excitations are gapless, given by Wess-Zumino-Novikov-Witten model plus transverse kinetic terms localized about different patches.