Some aspects of color superconductivity: an introduction

Abstract

A pedagogical introduction to color superconductivity in the weak coupling limit is given. The focus is on the basic tools of thermal field theory necessary to compute observables of color superconductivity. The rich symmetry structure and symmetry breaking patterns are analyzed on the basis of the Anderson-Higgs mechanism. Some techniques can also be applied for computing neutrino processes in compact stars. As an example, we show how to obtain the neutrino emissivity for Urca processes in neutron stars by computing the polarization tensor of the W-boson. We also illustrate how a spin-1 color superconducting phase generates an anisotropic neutrino emissions in compact stars.