Renormalization of the three-flavor quark-meson diquark model

TL;DR

This paper develops a renormalizable effective model for dense QCD, incorporating quarks, mesons, and diquarks, and applies it to study the properties of color superconducting phases, including gap and sound speed calculations.

Contribution

It introduces a renormalization scheme for the three-flavor quark-meson diquark model and derives RG equations to analyze dense QCD phases.

Findings

The gap approaches a constant at high chemical potential.

The speed of sound tends to the conformal limit from above.

The model successfully describes properties of the CFL phase.

Abstract

We discuss the properties of the two- and three-flavor quark-meson diquark (QMD) model as a renormalizable low-energy effective model for color superconductivity in dense QCD. The effective degrees of freedom are scalars, pseudo-scalars, diquarks, and quarks. The parameters in the scalar/pseudo-scalar sector can be determined by matching the meson pole masses and decay constants to their observed values using the on-shell renormalization scheme. The remaining parameters are in the diquark sector and a priori unknown. In principle, they can be calculated from QCD, but we consider them free. We renormalize the thermodynamic potential in the 2SC phase for two flavors and in the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase for three flavors, determining the counterterms of the couplings in the diquark sector. We derive a set of renormalization group equations for these couplings that are used to improve the thermodynamic potential. As an application, we calculate the gap and the speed of sound in the ideal CFL phase. It is shown that the gap approaches a constant as $\mu_B\rightarrow\infty$ and that the speed of sound relaxes to the conformal limit from above.