Isospin asymmetric matter in a nonlocal chiral quark model

Abstract

We analyze the features of strongly interacting matter in the presence of nonzero isospin chemical potential , within a nonlocal two-flavor Polyakov-loop extended Nambu-Jona-Lasinio (PNJL) model. For a system at finite temperature , we describe the behavior of various thermodynamic quantities and study the phase diagram in the plane. In particular, it is found that for values of larger than the pion mass and temperatures lower than a critical value of about 170 MeV the system lies in an isospin symmetry broken phase signalled by the presence of a nonzero pion condensate. Our results for the phase diagram are found to be in better agreement with those arising from lattice QCD calculations, as compared to the predictions from other theoretical approaches like the local PNJL model.