The Lifshitz Regime and its Experimental Signals

Understand

We discuss the possibility of a Lifshitz regime, where the dispersion relation for Goldstone bosons and related fields has a minimum at nonzero momenta.

• Studies with the Functional Renormalization Group suggest that this occurs over a wide region in the plane of temperature and baryon chemical potential.
• Conversely, the FRG finds that the region in which fluctuations from a critical endpoint are significant is rather small.
• We suggest that this is due generically to the narrowness of the tricritical region in the chiral limit.