Chromomagnetic stability of the three flavor Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell phase of QCD.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 0 6 0 2 1 8 0 v 1 2 0 F e b 2 0 0 6 BARI-TH 532/06 Chromomagnetic stability of the three flavor Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell phase of QCD M. Ciminale, G. Nardulli, and M. Ruggieri Universita? di Bari, I-70126 Bari, Italia and I.N.F.N., Sezione di Bari, I-70126 Bari, Italia R. Gatto De?part. de Physique The?orique, Universite? de Gene?ve, CH-1211 Gene?ve 4, Suisse (Dated: February 2, 2008) Abstract We compute in the Ginzburg-Landau approximation the gluon Meissner masses for the Larkin- Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell (LOFF) phase of QCD with three flavors in the kinematical range where it is energetically favored. We find real Meissner masses and therefore chromomagnetic stability. PACS numbers: 12.38.Aw, 12.38.Lg 1 I. INTRODUCTION The attractive interaction between quarks in the color antisymmetric channel leads at high densities and small temperatures to their Cooper pairing, see [1, 2] and for reviews [3, 4]; in particular, for three flavors at asymptotically high densities, the Color-Flavor-Locking (CFL) phase is the ground state of the theory, characterized by a spinless color- and flavor- antisymmetric diquark condensate [5]. The physically more interesting pre-asymptotic phases, where the mass of the strange quark and the chemical potential differences δμ due to β equilibrium cannot be neglected, are subject of intense study at this moment. Proposals include the 2SC phase [2], the gapless phases g2SC [6], and gCFL [7, 8]. Unfortunately the appearance of imaginary gluon Meissner masses (for g2SC see [9], for gCFL see [10]) makes the gapless phases instable, and also the 2SC phase shows instability [9] (in [11, 12] possible antidotes to cure the chromo-magnetic instability are discussed). However, for appropriate values of δμ, quarks may form pairs with non-vanishing total momentum: p1 + p2 = 2q 6= 0, see [13] and for a review [14], which leads to a Larkin- Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell (LOFF) [15] phase. For two flavors it has been sho