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Tomas Brauner

Publications and source records attributed to Tomas Brauner.

51 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Symmetry breaking patterns and collective modes of spin-one color superconductors

Spin-one color superconductor is a viable candidate phase of dense matter in the interiors of compact stars. Its low-energy excitations will influence the transport properties of such matter and thus have impact on late-stage evolution of neutron stars. It also provides a good example of spontaneous symmetry breaking with rich breaking patterns. In this contribution, we reanalyze the phase diagram of a spin-one color superconductor and point out that a part of it is occupied by noninert states, which have been neglected in literature so far. We classify the collective Nambu--Goldstone modes, which are essential to the transport phenomena.

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Pion condensation in a dense neutrino gas

We argue that using an equilibrated gas of neutrinos it is possible to probe the phase diagram of QCD for finite isospin and small baryon chemical potentials. We discuss this region of the phase diagram in detail and demonstrate that for large enough neutrino densities a Bose-Einstein condensate of positively charged pions arises. Moreover, we show that for nonzero neutrino density the degeneracy in the lifetimes and masses of the charged pions is lifted.

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Thermodynamics of the pion gas using the O(N) model in 1/N expansion

We investigate the thermodynamics of a pion gas within the O(N) model in the 1/N expansion. Using the auxiliary field technique, we compute the effective potential up to the next-to-leading order (NLO) and show that it can be renormalized in a temperature-independent manner. The crucial step for the consistency of the calculation turns out to be the elimination of the auxiliary field prior to renormalization. Subsequently, we solve the NLO gap equation for the chiral condensate as a function of temperature both in the chiral limit and with explicit symmetry breaking. We propose a simple semi-analytic estimate of the NLO correction to the condensate and compare it to the exact numerical solution. Finally, we show that in the chiral limit the chiral symmetry is restored at finite temperature by a second-order phase transition, and determine the critical scaling of the order parameter. We study the dependence of the critical temperature on the renormalized coupling and find that in contrast to the weak-coupling limit, at strong coupling the critical temperature increases at NLO.

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Strongly interacting Fermi systems in 1/N expansion: From cold atoms to color superconductivity

We investigate the 1/N expansion proposed recently as a strategy to include quantum fluctuation effects in the nonrelativistic, attractive Fermi gas at and near unitarity. We extend the previous results by calculating the next-to-leading order corrections to the critical temperature along the whole BCS-BEC crossover. We demonstrate explicitly that the extrapolation from the mean-field approximation, based on the $1/N$ expansion, provides a useful approximation scheme only on the BCS side of the crossover. We then apply the technique to the study of strongly interacting relativistic many-fermion systems. Having in mind the application to color superconductivity in cold dense quark matter, we develop, within a simple model, a formalism suitable to compare the effects of order parameter fluctuations in phases with different pairing patterns. Our main conclusion is that the relative correction to the critical temperature is to a good accuracy proportional to the mean-field ratio of the critical temperature and the chemical potential. As a consequence, it is significant even rather deep in the BCS regime, where phenomenologically interesting values of the quark-quark coupling are expected. Possible impact on the phase diagram of color-superconducting quark matter is discussed.

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Helical ordering in the ground state of spin-one color superconductors as a consequence of parity violation

We investigate spin-one color superconductivity of a single quark flavor using the Ginzburg-Landau theory. First we examine the classic analysis of Bailin and Love and show that by restricting to the so-called inert states, it misses the true ground state in a part of the phase diagram. This suggests the use of the more general, noninert states in particular within three-flavor quark matter where the color neutrality constraint imposes stress on the spin-one pairing and may disfavor the symmetric color-spin-locked state. In the second part of the paper we show that, in analogy to some ferromagnetic materials, lack of space-inversion symmetry leads to a new term in the Ginzburg-Landau functional, which favors a spatially nonuniform long-range ordering with a spiral structure. In color superconductors, this new parity-violating term is a tiny effect of weak-interaction physics. The modified phase diagram is determined and the corresponding ground states for all the phases constructed. At the end, we estimate the coefficient of the new term in the free energy functional, and discuss its relevance for the phenomenology of dense quark matter.

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Linear sigma model at finite density in the 1/N expansion to next-to-leading order

We study relativistic Bose-Einstein condensation at finite density and temperature using the linear sigma model in the one-particle-irreducible 1/N-expansion. We derive the effective potential to next-to-leading (NLO) order and show that it can be renormalized in a temperature-independent manner. As a particular application, we study the thermodynamics of the pion gas in the chiral limit as well as with explicit symmetry breaking. At nonzero temperature we solve the NLO gap equation and show that the results describe the chiral-symmetry-restoring second-order phase transition in agreement with general universality arguments. However, due to nontrivial regularization issues, we are not able to extend the NLO analysis to nonzero chemical potential.

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BCS-BEC crossover in dense relativistic matter: Collective excitations

We study the relativistic BCS-BEC crossover within a class of Nambu-Jona-Lasinio type models, including arbitrary Lorentz-scalar pairing channels. Using the mean-field approximation we investigate spectral properties of the collective bosonic excitations in the superfluid phase, with particular attention to the Nambu--Goldstone bosons of the broken symmetry. This is a first step towards a systematic improvement of the mean-field approximation by including the fluctuation effects. The general results are illustrated on pairing in dense two-flavor quark matter - the two-flavor color superconductor.

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Goldstone bosons in presence of charge density

We investigate spontaneous symmetry breaking in Lorentz-noninvariant theories. Our general discussion includes relativistic systems at finite density as well as intrinsically nonrelativistic systems. The main result of the paper is a direct proof that nonzero density of a non-Abelian charge in the ground state implies the existence of a Goldstone boson with nonlinear (typically, quadratic) dispersion law. We show that the Goldstone boson dispersion relation may in general be extracted from the current transition amplitude and demonstrate on examples from recent literature, how the calculation of the dispersion relation is utilized by this method. After then, we use the general results to analyze the nonrelativistic degenerate Fermi gas of four fermion species. Due to its internal SU(4) symmetry, this system provides an analog to relativistic two-color quantum chromodynamics with two quark flavors. In the end, we extend our results to pseudo-Goldstone bosons of an explicitly broken symmetry.

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Dynamical breakdown of Abelian gauge chiral symmetry by strong Yukawa interactions

We consider a model with anomaly-free Abelian gauge axial-vector symmetry, which is intended to mimic the standard electroweak gauge chiral SU(2)_L x U(1)_Y theory. Within this model we demonstrate: (1) Strong Yukawa interactions between massless fermion fields and a massive scalar field carrying the axial charge generate dynamically the fermion and boson proper self-energies, which are ultraviolet-finite and chirally noninvariant. (2) Solutions of the underlying Schwinger-Dyson equations found numerically exhibit a huge amplification of the fermion mass ratios as a response to mild changes of the ratios of the Yukawa couplings. (3) The `would-be' Nambu-Goldstone boson is a composite of both the fermion and scalar fields, and it gives rise to the mass of the axial-vector gauge boson. (4) Spontaneous breakdown of the gauge symmetry further manifests by mass splitting of the complex scalar and by new symmetry-breaking vertices, generated at one loop. In particular, we work out in detail the cubic vertex of the Abelian gauge boson.

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Spontaneous symmetry breaking in the linear sigma model at finite chemical potential: One-loop corrections

We investigate spontaneous symmetry breaking within the linear sigma model with the SU(2)xU(1) internal symmetry at finite chemical potential, which was suggested as a model for kaon condensation in the CFL phase of dense quark matter. One-loop corrections to the scalar field effective potential as well as its propagator are calculated. Particular attention is paid to the type-II Goldstone boson that appears in the Bose--Einstein condensed phase. Furthermore, we show that the type-I Goldstone boson -- the superfluid phonon -- is allowed to decay due to the nonlinearity of its dispersion relation at high momentum, and determine its decay width.

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Goldstone boson counting in linear sigma models with chemical potential

We analyze the effects of finite chemical potential on spontaneous breaking of internal symmetries within the class of relativistic field theories described by the linear sigma model. Special attention is paid to the emergence of ``abnormal'' Goldstone bosons with quadratic dispersion relation. We show that their presence is tightly connected to nonzero density of the Noether charges, and formulate a general counting rule. The general results are demonstrated on an SU(3)xU(1) invariant model with an SU(3)-sextet scalar field, which describes one of the color-superconducting phases of QCD.

hep-ph↗

Dynamical fermion mass generation by a strong Yukawa interaction

We consider a model with global Abelian chiral symmetry of two massless fermion fields interacting with a complex massive scalar field. We argue that the Schwinger-Dyson equations for the fermion and boson propagators admit ultraviolet-finite chiral-symmetry-breaking solutions provided the Yukawa couplings are large enough. The fermions acquire masses and the elementary excitations of the complex scalar field are the two real spin-zero particles with different masses. As a necessary consequence of the dynamical chiral symmetry breakdown both in the fermion and scalar sectors, one massless pseudoscalar Nambu--Goldstone boson appears in the spectrum as a collective excitation of both the fermion and the boson fields. Its effective couplings to the fermion and boson fields are calculable.

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A model of flavors

We argue in favor of dynamical mass generation in an SU(2)xU(1) electroweak model with two complex scalar doublets with ordinary masses. The masses of leptons and quarks are generated by ultraviolet-finite non-perturbative solutions of the Schwinger-Dyson equations for full fermion propagators with self-consistently modified scalar boson exchanges. The W and Z boson masses are expressed in terms of spontaneously generated fermion proper self-energies in the form of sum rules. The model predicts two charged and four real neutral heavy scalars.

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