We study QCD-like theories with pseudoreal fermions at finite baryon density. Such theories include two-color QCD with quarks in the fundamental representation of the color group as well as any-color QCD with quarks in the adjoint color representation. In all such theories the lightest baryons are diquarks. At zero chemical potential µ they are, together with the pseudoscalar mesons, the Goldstone modes of a spontaneously broken enlarged chiral symmetry group. Using symmetry principles, we derive the low-energy effective Lagrangian for these particles. We find that a second order phase transition occurs at a value of µ equal to half the mass of the Goldstone modes. For values of µ beyond this point the scalar diquarks Bose condense and the diquark condensate is nonzero. We calculate the dependence of the chiral condensate, the diquark condensate, the baryon charge density, and the masses of the diquark and pseudoscalar excitations on µ at finite bare quark mass and scalar diquark source. The relevance of our results to lattice QCD calculations and to real three-color QCD at finite baryon density is discussed.

We study SU(2) color QCD with even number of quark flavors. First, using QCD inequalities we show that at finite baryon chemical potential µ, condensation must occur in the channel with scalar diquark quantum numbers. This breaks the U(1) symmetry generated by baryon charge (baryon superconductivity). Then we derive the effective Lagrangian describing low lying meson and baryon excitations using extended local chiral symmetry of the theory. This enables us to determine the leading term in the dependence of the masses on µ exactly.

We study the spectrum of the QCD Dirac operator by means of the valence quark mass dependence of the chiral condensate in partially quenched Chiral Perturbation Theory (pqChPT) in the supersymmetric formulation of Bernard and Golterman. We consider valence quark masses both in the ergodic domain (m v ≪ E c ) and the diffusive domain (m v ≫ E c ). These domains are separated by a mass scale E c ∼ F 2 /Σ 0 L 2 (with F the pion decay constant, Σ 0 the chiral condensate and L the size of the box). In the ergodic domain the effective super-Lagrangian reproduces the microscopic spectral density of chiral Random Matrix Theory (chRMT). We obtain a natural explanation of Damgaard's relation between the spectral density and the finite volume partition function with two additional flavors. We argue that in the ergodic domain the natural measure for the superunitary integration in the pqChPT partition function is noncompact. We find that the tail of the two-point spectral correlation function derived from pqChPT agrees with the chRMT result in the ergodic domain. In the diffusive domain we extend the results for the slope of the Dirac spectrum first obtained by Smilga and Stern. We find that the spectral density diverges logarithmically for nonzero topological susceptibility. We study the transition between the ergodic and the diffusive domain and identify a range where chRMT and pqChPT coincide.

We derive the microscopic spectral density of the Dirac operator in SU(N c ≥ 3) YangMills theory coupled to N f fermions in the fundamental representation. An essential technical ingredient is an exact rewriting of this density in terms of integrations over the super Riemannian manifold Gl(N f + 1|1). The result agrees exactly with earlier calculations based on Random Matrix Theory.

We study the effects of small chemical potentials associated with the three light quark flavors in QCD. We use a low-energy effective field theory that solely relies on the symmetries of the QCD partition function. We find three different phases: a normal phase, a pion superfluid phase and a kaon superfluid phase. The two superfluid phases are separated by a first order phase transition, whereas the normal phase and either of the superfluid phases are separated by a second order phase transition. We compute the quark-antiquark condensate, the pion condensate and the kaon condensate in each phase, as well as the isospin density, the strangeness density, and the mass spectrum.