Two-flavor condensates in chiral dynamics: temperature and isospin density effects

Isospin density and thermal corrections for several condensates are discussed, at the one-loop level, in the frame of chiral dynamics with pionic degrees of freedom. The evolution of such objects give an additional insight into the condensed-pion phase transition, that occurs basically when |\mui|>m_\pi, being |\mui| the isospin chemical potential. Calculations are done in both phases, showing a good agreement with lattice results for such condensates.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figure

Weinberg power counting and the quark determinant at small chemical potential

We construct an effective action for QCD by expanding the quark determinant in powers of the chemical potential at finite temperature in the case of massless quarks. To cut the infinite series we adopt the Weinberg power counting criteria. We compute the minimal effective action (~p^4), expanding in the external momentum, which implies the use of the hard thermal loop approximation. Our main result is a gauge invariant expression for the phase theta of the functional determinant in QCD, and recovers dimensional reduction in the high-temperature limit. We compute, analytically, in the range of p << 2 pi T, including perturbative and nonperturbative contributions, the latter treated within the mean field approximation. Implications for lattice simulations are briefly discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. v2: title changed, expanded discussion and added example (calculation of at high temperature). Published in PR