Are there plasminos in superconductors?

Hot and/or dense, normal-conducting systems of relativistic fermions exhibit a particular collective excitation, the so-called plasmino. We compute the one-loop self-energy, the dispersion relation and the spectral density for fermions interacting via attractive boson exchange. It is shown that plasminos also exist in superconductors.Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures, revte

Chiral transition and mesonic excitations for quarks with thermal masses

We study the effect of a thermal quark mass, m_T, on the chiral phase transition and mesonic excitations in the light quark sector at finite temperature in a simple chirally-symmetric model. We show that while nonzero m_T lowers the chiral condensate, the chiral transition remains of second order. It is argued that the mesonic excitations have large decay rate at energies below 2m_T, owing to the Landau damping of the quarks and the van Hove singularities of the collective modes.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, typos correcte

Vanishing Thermal Mass in the Strongly Coupled QCD/QED medium

In this paper we perform a nonperturbative analysis of a thermal quasifermion in thermal QCD/QED by studying its self-energy function through the Dyson-Schwinger equation with the hard-thermal-loop resummed improved ladder kernel. Our analysis reveals several interesting results, some of which may force us to change the image of the thermal quasifermion: (1) The thermal mass of a quasifermion begins to decrease as the coupling gets stronger and finally disappears in the strong coupling region,(2) the imaginary part of the chiral invariant mass function (i.e., the decay width of the quasifermion) persists to have $O(g^2 T \log (1/g))$ behavior. Present results suggest that in the recently produced strongly coupled quark-gluon-plasma, the thermal mass of a quasifermion should vanish. We also briefly comment on evidence of the existence of a massless, or an ultrasoft mode.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, Published versio

Groundstate projection of the charged SU(2) polarization tensor in a chromomagnetic background field

We consider the polarization tensor of a color charged gluon field in SU(2) in the background of a homogeneous color magnetic field and calculate its projection onto the lower (tachyonic) state. We obtain a quite simple representation of the polarization tensor in terms of double parametric integral. We provide examples for the numerical evaluation of the polarization tensor in this case. Also, we consider the corresponding expressions at high temperature and calculate the charged gluon magnetic mass in this limit. We conclude that radiation corrections stabilize the ground state. Applications of the results obtained are discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figure

Thermal mass and dispersion relations of quarks in the deconfined phase of quenched QCD

Temporal quark correlation functions are analyzed in quenched lattice QCD for two values of temperature above the critical temperature (Tc) for deconfinement, T=1.5Tc and 3Tc. A two-pole ansatz for the quark spectral function is used to determine the bare quark mass and the momentum dependence of excitation spectra on large lattices of size up to 128^3x16. The dependence of the quark correlator on these parameters as well as the finite volume dependence of the excitation energies are analyzed in detail in order to examine the reliability of our analysis. Our results suggest the existence of quasi-particle peaks in the quark spectrum. We furthermore find evidence that the dispersion relation of the plasmino mode has a minimum at non-zero momentum even in the non-perturbative region near Tc. We also elaborate on the enhancement of the quark correlator near the chiral limit which is observed at T=1.5Tc on about half of the gauge configurations. We attribute this to the presence of near zero-modes of the fermion matrix that are associated with non-trivial topology of the gauge configurations.Comment: 12pages, 7 figure

Spectral properties of massless and massive quarks coupled with massive boson at finite temperature

We study the properties of massless and massive quarks coupled with a scalar and pseudoscalar boson at finite temperature in Yukawa models at the one-loop order. The behavior of the spectral function and the pole structure of the propagator are analyzed as functions of temperature $T$ and the quark mass $m_f$. It is shown that the three-peak structure of the spectral function found in a previous work for massless quarks is formed at temperatures comparable to the boson mass even for finite $m_f$, but gradually ceases to exist as $m_f$ becomes larger. We identify the three poles of the quark propagator corresponding to the collective excitations of the quark in the complex energy plane. It is shown that the three trajectories made by the poles along with a variation of $T$ undergo a structural rearrangement at a critical quark mass when $m_f$ is increased. This suggests that the physics content of the collective quark excitations is changed in a drastic way at this point. The results are nicely accounted for with the notion of the level mixing induced by a resonant scattering of the massive boson with quarks and holes of thermally excited anti-quarks.Comment: 16 pages, 36 eps figures. Accepted for publication in Physical Reviw

Resonant Relaxation in Electroweak Baryogenesis

We compute the leading, chiral charge-changing relaxation term in the quantum transport equations that govern electroweak baryogenesis using the closed time path formulation of non-equilibrium quantum field theory. We show that the relaxation transport coefficients may be resonantly enhanced under appropriate conditions on electroweak model parameters and that such enhancements can mitigate the impact of similar enhancements in the CP-violating source terms. We also develop a power counting in the time and energy scales entering electroweak baryogenesis and include effects through second order in ratios $\epsilon$ of the small and large scales. We illustrate the implications of the resonantly enhanced ${\cal O}(\epsilon^2)$ terms using the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, focusing on the interplay between the requirements of baryogenesis and constraints obtained from collider studies, precision electroweak data, and electric dipole moment searches.Comment: 30 pages plus appendices, 7 figure