The QCD phase diagram is studied in the presence of an isospin asymmetry using continuum extrapolated staggered quarks with physical masses. In particular, we investigate the phase boundary between the normal and the pion condensation phases and the chiral/deconfinement transition. The simulations are performed with a small explicit breaking parameter in order to avoid the accumulation of zero modes and thereby stabilize the algorithm. The limit of vanishing explicit breaking is obtained by means of an extrapolation, which is facilitated by a novel improvement program employing the singular value representation of the Dirac operator. Our findings indicate that no pion condensation takes place above $T\approx 160\mathrm{MeV}$ and also suggest that the deconfinement crossover continuously connects to the BEC-BCS crossover at high isospin asymmetries. The results may be directly compared to effective theories and model approaches to QCD.

• Received 10 January 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.054514

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Published by the American Physical Society