Chiral Vacuum Alignment in Dense QCD

Abstract

We discuss an interesting possibility of nontrivial, quark-mass induced chiral vacuum alignment in color-flavor locking phase of cold, dense QCD. With the simplifying assumption that the gaps for quarks are identical to those of antiquarks and the light quark masses are given by $m_u = m_d$ and $ m_s/m_d=15$, we find the true chiral vacuum can align only to one of the discrete number of directions in the continuum of chiral vacua. The alignment depends on the size of the diquark condensates, and the vacuum transitions between the discrete vacua caused by the evolution of the diquark condensates can be first order phase transition with vanishing or nonvanishing latent heat, depending on the vacua involved. It is also shown that as $\mu \to \infty$, where $\mu$ is the baryon chemical potential, parity is spontaneously broken through the vacuum alignment.