Phase structure, collective modes, and the axial anomaly in dense QCD

Abstract

Using a general Ginzburg-Landau effective Lagrangian, we study the topological structure and low-lying collective modes of dense QCD having both chiral and diquark condensates, for two and three massless flavors. As we found earlier, the QCD axial anomaly acts as an external field applied to the chiral condensate in a color superconductor and, as a new critical point emerges, leads to a crossover between the broken chiral symmetry and color superconducting phases. At intermediate densities where both chiral and diquark condensates are present, we derive a generalized Gell-Mann--Oakes-Renner relation between the masses of pseudoscalar bosons and the magnitude of the chiral and diquark condensates. We show explicitly the continuity of the ordinary pion at low densities to a generalized pion at high densities.