Dirac spectrum and the BEC-BCS crossover in QCD at nonzero isospin asymmetry

Understand

For large isospin asymmetries, perturbation theory predicts the QCD ground state to be a superfluid phase of $u$ and $\bar{d}$ Cooper pairs.

• This phase, which is denoted as the BCS phase, is expected to be smoothly connected to the standard phase with Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of charged pions at $\mu_I\ge m_\pi/2$ by an analytic crossover.
• A first hint for the existence of the BCS phase, which is likely characterised by the presence of both, deconfinement and charged pion condensation, is coming from the lattice observation that the deconfinement crossover smoothly penetrates into the BEC phase.
• To further scrutinize the existence of the BCS phase, in this proceedings article we investigate the complex spectrum of the massive Dirac operator in 2+1-flavor QCD at nonzero temperature and isospin chemical potential.