Critical temperature for kaon condensation in color-flavor-locked quark matter

Abstract

We study the behavior of Goldstone bosons in color-flavor-locked (CFL) quark matter at nonzero temperature. Chiral symmetry breaking in this phase of cold and dense matter gives rise to pseudo-Goldstone bosons, the lightest of these being the charged and neutral kaons K+ and K0. At zero temperature, Bose–Einstein condensation of the kaons occurs. Since all fermions are gapped, this kaon-condensed CFL phase can, for energies below the fermionic energy gap, be described by an effective theory for the bosonic modes. We use this effective theory to investigate the melting of the condensate: we determine the temperature-dependent kaon masses self-consistently using the two-particle irreducible effective action, and we compute the transition temperature for Bose–Einstein condensation. Our results are important for studies of transport properties of the kaon-condensed CFL phase, such as bulk viscosity.