On the Search for Inhomogeneous Phases in Fermionic Models

Abstract: We revisit the Gross-Neveu model with N fermion flavors in 1+1 dimensions and compute its phase diagram at finite temperature and chemical potential in the large-N limit. To this end, we double the number of fermion degrees of freedom in a specific way which allows us to detect inhomogeneous phases in an efficient manner. We show analytically that this "fermion doubling trick" predicts correctly the position of the boundary between the chirally symmetric phase and the phase with broken chiral symmetry. Most importantly, we find that the emergence of an inhomogeneous ground state is predicted correctly. We critically analyze our approach based on this trick and discuss its applicability to other theories, such as fermionic models in higher dimensions, where it may be used to guide the search for inhomogeneous phases.