Quark Matter

Abstract

In these lectures we provide an introduction to the theory of QCD at very high baryon density. We begin with a review of some aspects of quantum many-body system that are relevant in the QCD context. We also provide a brief review of QCD and its symmetries. The main part of these lectures is devoted to the phenomenon of color superconductivity. We discuss the use of weak coupling methods and study the phase structure as a function of the number of flavors and their masses. We also introduce effective theories that describe low energy excitations at high baryon density. Finally, we use effective field theory methods in order to study the effects of a non-zero strange quark mass.