Holographic description of color superconductivity

Abstract

The difficulty of describing the gauge dependent biquark condensate in the QCD color superconducting phase has made it hard to construct a holographic dual of the state. To side step this problem, we argue that near the chiral restoration transition in the temperature-chemical potential plane, the strongly coupled gluons are likely completely gapped so that the color quantum numbers of the quarks can be thought of below that gap as global indices. A standard anti-de Sitter–superconductor model can then be used to analyze the fermionic gap formation. We investigate the role of four-fermion interactions, which might be used to include the gapped QCD interactions, on the vacuum and metastable vacua of the model. It turns out to be easiest to simply relate the standard interaction of the holographic superconductor to the strength of the gapped gluons. The result is a holographic description of the QCD color superconducting phase diagram. We take a first look at how quark mass enters and causes a transition between the color-flavor locked phase and the two flavor color superconducting phase.

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