Topology and stability of the Kondo phase in quark matter

Understand

We investigate properties of the ground state of a light quark matter with heavy quark impurities.

• This system exhibits the "QCD Kondo effect" where the interaction strength between a light quark near the Fermi surface and a heavy quark increases with decreasing energy of the light quark towards the Fermi energy, and diverges at some scale near the Fermi energy, called the Kondo scale.
• Around and below the Kondo scale, we must treat the dynamics nonperturbatively.
• As a typical nonperturbative method to treat the strong coupling regime, we adopt a mean-field approach where we introduce a condensate, the Kondo condensate, representing a mixing between a light quark and a heavy quark, and determine the ground state in the presence of the Kondo condensate.