Spectral Continuity in Dense QCD

Abstract

The vector mesons in three-flavor quark matter with chiral and diquark condensates are studied using the in-medium QCD sum rules. The diquark condensate leads to a mass splitting between the flavor-octet and flavor-singlet channels. At high density, the singlet vector meson disappears from the low-energy spectrum, while the octet vector mesons survive as light excitations with a mass comparable to the fermion gap. A possible connection between the light gluonic modes and the flavor-octet vector mesons at high density is also discussed.