QCD at small non-zero quark chemical potentials

Abstract

We study the effects of small chemical potentials associated with the three light quark flavors in QCD. We use a low-energy effective field theory that solely relies on the symmetries of the QCD partition function. We find three different phases: a normal phase, a pion superfluid phase and a kaon superfluid phase. The two superfluid phases are separated by a first order phase transition, whereas the normal phase and either of the superfluid phases are separated by a second order phase transition. We compute the quark-antiquark condensate, the pion condensate and the kaon condensate in each phase, as well as the isospin density, the strangeness density, and the mass spectrum.