2002/10/31 by J. Wirstam, J. T. Lenaghan, Jonathan Lenaghan +1
Physics and Astronomy · #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #hep-lat #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.67.034021
published as Phys.Rev. D67 (2003) 034021 · 10 pages, 1 figure, revtex, reference added, version to appear in PRD
arxiv created 2003/01/22 · openalex publication_date 2003/02/27 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We use a Landau theory and the \ensuremathε expansion to study the superfluid phase transition of two-color QCD at a nonzero temperature T and baryonic chemical potential \ensuremathμ. At low T, and for Nf flavors of massless quarks, the global SU(Nf)\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fiSU(Nf)\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fiU(1) symmetry is spontaneously broken by a diquark condensate down to Sp(Nf)\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fiSp(Nf) for any \ensuremathμ>0. As the temperature increases, the diquark condensate melts, and at sufficiently large T the symmetry is restored. Using renormalization group arguments, we find that in the presence of the chiral anomaly term there can be a second order phase transition when Nf=2 or Nf>~6, while the transition is first order for Nf=4. We discuss the relevance of these results for the emergence of a tricritical point recently observed in lattice simulations.