Instanton effects in QCD at high baryon density

We study instanton effects in QCD at very high baryon density. In this regime instantons are suppressed by a large power of (Λ_QCD/μ), where Λ_QCD is the QCD scale parameter and μ is the baryon chemical potential. Instantons are nevertheless important because they contribute to several physical observables that vanish to all orders in perturbative QCD. We study, in particular, the chiral condensate and its contribution m_GB²∼m〈ψ̅ ψ〉 to the masses of Goldstone bosons in the CFL phase of QCD with N_f=3 flavors. We find that at densities ρ∼(5-10)ρ₀, where ρ₀ is the density of nuclear matter, the result is dominated by large instantons and subject to considerable uncertainties. We suggest that these uncertainties can be addressed using lattice calculations of the instanton density and the pseudoscalar diquark mass in QCD with two colors. We study the topological susceptibility and Witten-Veneziano type mass relations in both N_c=2 and N_c=3 QCD.