Quantum Hall liquids in high-density QCD

TL;DR

This paper explores the effective theories and excitations on domain walls in high-density QCD phases, revealing a duality between Chern-Simons theories and identifying vector meson excitations without baryon number.

Contribution

It introduces a novel effective theory description of domain walls in high-density QCD, showing a duality between SU(2) and U(1) Chern-Simons theories and identifying new vector meson excitations.

Findings

Effective SU(2)_{-1} Chern-Simons theory describes domain walls.

Identification of a spin-1 vector meson excitation without baryon number.

Duality between SU(2) and U(1) Chern-Simons theories on the domain wall.

Abstract

There exist metastable domain walls of the flavor-singlet meson $\eta$ for the ${\rm U}(1)$ axial symmetry in two-flavor color superconductivity (2SC) in QCD at large baryon density. We show that, due to the coupling of $\eta$ to confined ${\rm SU}(2)$ gluons in the 2SC phase, the effective theory on the domain wall is described by the ${\rm SU}(2)_{-1}$ Chern-Simons theory, which is dual to the ${\rm U}(1)_{2}$ Chern-Simons theory. This theory has a spin-1 droplet excitation that does not carry a baryon number, which we identify as a vector meson. We also discuss the effective theories and baryonic droplet excitations on the domain walls of the flavor-singlet mesons in the superfluid phases of QCD at large isospin density and two-color QCD at large baryon density.