Phase structure, collective modes, and the axial anomaly in dense QCD

Understand

Using a general Ginzburg-Landau effective Lagrangian, we study the topological structure and low-lying collective modes of dense QCD having both chiral and diquark condensates, for two and three massless flavors.

• As we found earlier, the QCD axial anomaly acts as an external field applied to the chiral condensate in a color superconductor and, as a new critical point emerges, leads to a crossover between the broken chiral symmetry and color superconducting phases.
• At intermediate densities where both chiral and diquark condensates are present, we derive a generalized Gell-Mann- Oakes-Renner relation between the masses of pseudoscalar bosons and the magnitude of the chiral and diquark-condensates.
• We show explicitly the continuity of the ordinary pion at low densities to a generalized pion at high densities.