Color superconductivity: Continuity of quark and hadron matter, the role of the strange quark mass, and perturbative results
We summarize some recent results on the structure of QCD at very high baryon density.
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arXiv subjects
Thomas Schaefer
Publications and source records attributed to Thomas Schaefer.
Superconductivity from perturbative one-gluon exchange in high density quark matter
We study color superconductivity in QCD at asymptotically large chemical potential. In this limit, pairing is dominated by perturbative one-gluon exchange. We derive the Eliashberg equation for the pairing gap and solve this equation numerically. Taking into account both magnetic and electric gluon exchanges, we find $Δ\sim g^{-5}\exp(-c/g)$ with $c=3π^2/\sqrt{2}$, verifying a recent result by Son. For chemical potentials that are of physical interest, $μ< 1$ GeV, the calculation ceases to be reliable quantitatively, but our results suggest that the gap can be as large as 100 MeV.
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Quark Description of Hadronic Phases
We extend our proposal that major universality classes of hadronic matter can be understood, and in favorable cases calculated, directly in the microscopic quark variables, to allow for splitting between strange and light quark masses. A surprisingly simple but apparently viable picture emerges, featuring essentially three phases, distinguished by whether strangeness is conserved (standard nuclear matter), conserved modulo two (hypernuclear matter), or locked to color (color flavor locking). These are separated by sharp phase transitions. There is also, potentially, a quark phase matching hadronic K-condensation. The smallness of the secondary gap in two-flavor color superconductivity corresponds to the disparity between the primary dynamical energy scales of QCD and the much smaller energy scales of nuclear physics.
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Continuity of Quark and Hadron Matter
We review, clarify, and extend the notion of color-flavor locking. We present evidence that for three degenerate flavors the qualitative features of the color-flavor locked state, reliably predicted for high density, match the expected features of hadronic matter at low density. This provides, in particular, a controlled, weak-coupling realization of confinement and chiral symmetry breaking in this (slight) idealization of QCD.
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High Density Quark Matter and the Renormalization Group in QCD with two and three flavors
We consider the most general four fermion operators in QCD for two and three massless flavors and study their renormalization in the vicinity of the Fermi surface. We show that, asymptotically, the largest coupling corresponds to scalar diquark condensation. Asymptotically the direct and iterated (molecular) instanton interactions become equal. We provide simple arguments for the form of the operators that diagonalize the evolution equations. Some solutions of the flow equations exhibit instabilities arising out of purely repulsive interactions.
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Instantons and the Chiral Phase Transition at non-zero Baryon Density
We study an interacting ensemble of instantons at finite baryon chemical potential. We emphasize the importance of fermionic zero modes and calculate the fermion induced interaction between instantons at non-zero chemical potential. We show that unquenched simulations of the instanton ensemble are feasible in two regimes, for sufficiently small and for very large chemical potential. At very large chemical potential chiral symmetry is restored and the instanton ensemble is dominated by strongly correlated chain-like configurations.
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The axial anomaly in QCD at finite temperature
We study flavor mixing and the axial anomaly in QCD at zero and finite temperature. Using the instanton liquid model, we show that the strength of the anomaly is essentially unchanged near the critical temperature for chiral symmetry restoration. We demonstrate that nevertheless, chiral symmetry restoration has important consequences for the eta and eta prime. In particular, the strange and non-strange components of the eta unmix near T_c. The anomaly does not affect the strange eta, so we expect a light purely strange pseudoscalar meson near the phase transition.
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The Chiral Phase Transition
I review the current understanding of the chiral phase transition in QCD, with particular emphasis on recent results obtained in the instanton liquid model.
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