The Nonperturbative Color Meissner Effect in a Two-Flavor Color Superconductor

Abstract

Color superconductivity in QCD breaks the SU(3) color gauge group down to SU(2), inducing masses in five of the eight gluons. This is a dynamical Higgs effect, in which the diquark condensate acts as the vacuum expectation value of a composite scalar field. In order to analyze this effect at low quark density, when gaps are large and generated nonperturbatively, we use instanton-induced quark interactions augmented with gauge-invariant interactions between quarks and perturbative gluons. The five gluon masses are found from the static limit of the relevant polarization operators, in which transversality is maintained via the Nambu-Goldstone modes of broken color symmetry. Working in the microscopic theory we calculate these masses to one-loop order and estimate their density dependence. Finally, we speculate that the Meissner effect may postpone the onset of color superconductivity to higher matter density than estimated previously.