AbstractWe calculate the light-quark condensate, the strange-quark condensate, the pion condensate, and the axial condensate in three-flavor chiral perturbation theory ($$\chi $$
χ
PT) in the presence of an isospin chemical potential at next-to-leading order at zero temperature. It is shown that the three-flavor $$\chi $$
χ
PT effective potential and condensates can be mapped onto two-flavor $$\chi $$
χ
PT ones by integrating out mesons with strange-quark content (kaons and eta), with renormalized couplings. We compare the results for the light-quark and pion condensates at finite pseudoscalar source with ($$2+1$$
2
+
1
)-flavor lattice QCD, and we also compare the axial condensate at zero pseudoscalar and axial sources with lattice QCD data. We find that the light-quark, pion, and axial condensates are in very good agreement with lattice data. There is an overall improvement by including NLO effects.
Random matrix theory, chiral perturbation theory, and lattice data
