Photon self-energy in a color superconductor

Abstract

In a color superconductor the diquark condensates break spontaneously both the color and ordinary electromagnetism, leaving a remaining rotated U(1) symmetry unbroken. The gauge interactions associated with this rotated symmetry may be considered as the in-medium electromagnetism. We compute the in-medium photon self-energy in the presence of diquark condensates at high baryonic density and weak coupling. This is done to one-loop order for the cases of two and three quark flavors. For vanishing temperature, a detailed discussion is given of the low momentum behavior of the photon polarization tensor. A simple physical picture for the propagation of light in color superconducting media is obtained. The main new effect is due to the diquark condensates, which lead to a strong dielectric constant of the medium. The magnetic permeability remains unchanged, because the primary condensates have vanishing spin and angular momentum. In the two flavor case, an additional contribution arises due to gapless quarks and electrons, which is responsible for Debye screening effects. We also discuss the low energy effective theory for the three flavor case in the presence of electromagnetic interactions.

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