Debye screening and Meissner effect in a three-flavor color superconductor

Abstract

I compute the gluon self-energy in a color superconductor with three flavors of massless quarks, where condensation of Cooper pairs breaks the color and flavor SU(3)_c x U(3)_V x U(3)_A symmetry of QCD to the diagonal subgroup SU(3)_{c+V}. At zero temperature, all eight electric gluons obtain a Debye screening mass, and all eight magnetic gluons a Meissner mass. The Debye as well as the Meissner masses are found to be equal for the different gluon colors. These masses determine the coefficients of the kinetic terms in the effective theory for the low-energy degrees of freedom. Their values agree with those obtained by Son and Stephanov.