2007/07/31 by Mark G. Alford, Mark Alford, Matt Braby +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #astro-ph #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0954-3899/35/2/025002
published as J.Phys.G35:025002,2008 · 24 pages, 8 figures, v2: new section about effect of electric neutrality on critical temperature added; references added; version to appear in J.Phys.G
arxiv created 2007/11/21 · openalex publication_date 2007/12/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We study the behavior of Goldstone bosons in color-flavor-locked (CFL) quark matter at nonzero temperature. Chiral symmetry breaking in this phase of cold and dense matter gives rise to pseudo-Goldstone bosons, the lightest of these being the charged and neutral kaons K + and K 0 . At zero temperature, Bose–Einstein condensation of the kaons occurs. Since all fermions are gapped, this kaon-condensed CFL phase can, for energies below the fermionic energy gap, be described by an effective theory for the bosonic modes. We use this effective theory to investigate the melting of the condensate: we determine the temperature-dependent kaon masses self-consistently using the two-particle irreducible effective action, and we compute the transition temperature for Bose–Einstein condensation. Our results are important for studies of transport properties of the kaon-condensed CFL phase, such as bulk viscosity.