Vacuum free energy, quark condensate shifts and magnetization in three-flavor chiral perturbation theory to $\mathcal{O}(p^6)$ in a uniform magnetic field

Abstract: We study three-flavor QCD in a uniform magnetic field using chiral perturbation theory ($\chi$PT). We construct the vacuum free energy density, quark condensate shifts induced by the magnetic field and the renormalized magnetization to $\mathcal{O}(p^6)$ in the chiral expansion. We find that the calculation of the free energy is greatly simplified by cancellations among two-loop diagrams involving charged mesons. In comparing our results with recent $2+1$-flavor lattice QCD data, we find that the light quark condensate shift at $\mathcal{O}(p^6)$ is in better agreement than the shift at $\mathcal{O}(p^4)$. We also find that the renormalized magnetization, due to its smallness, possesses large uncertainties at $\mathcal{O}(p^{6})$ due to the uncertainties in the low-energy constants.