When the Transition Temperature in Color Superconductors is Not Like in BCS Theory

Abstract

We study color superconductivity with $N_f=1,2,$ and 3 massless flavors of quarks. We present a general formalism to derive and solve the gap equations for condensation in the even-parity channel. This formalism shows that the leading-order contribution to the gap equation is unique for all color superconductors studied here, and that differences arise solely at the subleading order. We discuss a simple method to compute subleading contributions from the integration over gluon momenta in the gap equation. Subleading contributions enter the prefactor of the color-superconducting gap parameter. In the case of color-flavor and color-spin locking we identify further corrections to this prefactor arising from the two-gap structure of the quasiparticle excitations. Computing the transition temperature, $T_c$, where the color-superconducting condensate melts, we find that these contributions lead to deviations from the BCS behavior $T_c\simeq 0.57 \phi_0$, where $\phi_0$ is the magnitude of the zero-temperature gap at the Fermi surface.