Mass Terms in Effective Theories of High Density Quark Matter

Abstract

We study the structure of mass terms in the effective theory for quasi-particles in QCD at high baryon density. To next-to-leading order in the $1/p_F$ expansion we find two types of mass terms, chirality conserving two-fermion operators and chirality violating four-fermion operators. In the effective chiral theory for Goldstone modes in the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase the former terms correspond to effective chemical potentials, while the latter lead to Lorentz invariant mass terms. We compute the masses of Goldstone bosons in the CFL phase, confirming earlier results by Son and Stephanov as well as Bedaque and Schäfer. We show that to leading order in the coupling constant $g$ there is no anti-particle gap contribution to the mass of Goldstone modes, and that our results are independent of the choice of gauge.

22 pages, 4 figures