General effective action for high-density quark matter

We derive a general effective action for quark matter at nonzero temperature and/or nonzero density. For this purpose, we distinguish irrelevant from relevant quark modes, as well as hard from soft gluon modes by introducing two separate cutoffs in momentum space, one for quarks, Λ_q, and one for gluons, Λ_g. We exactly integrate out irrelevant quark modes and hard gluon modes in the functional integral representation of the QCD partition function. Depending on the specific choice for Λ_q and Λ_g, the resulting effective action contains well-known effective actions for hot and/or dense quark matter, for instance the “Hard Thermal Loop” or the “Hard Dense Loop” action, as well as the high-density effective theory proposed by Hong and others. We then apply our effective action to review the calculation of the color-superconducting gap parameter to subleading order in weak coupling, where the strong coupling constant g≪1. In this situation, relevant quark modes are those within a layer of thickness 2Λ_q around the Fermi surface. The nonperturbative nature of the gap equation invalidates naive attempts to estimate the importance of the various contributions via power counting on the level of the effective action. Nevertheless, once the gap equation has been derived within a particular many-body approximation scheme, the cutoffs Λ_q,Λ_g provide the means to rigorously power count different contributions to the gap equation. We recover the previous result for the QCD gap parameter for the choice Λ_q≲gμ≪Λ_g≲μ, where μ is the quark chemical potential. We also point out how to improve this result beyond subleading order in weak coupling.