We explore the relation between the chromomagnetic instability of a homogeneous two flavor color superconductor and the LOFF state. We perturb the free energy of the 2SC by generating a small net momentum for the quark pair. We find that the imaginary Meissner mass of a particular gluon implies that the LOFF state is energetically favored. 1

We apply the Ginzburg-Landau theory to the colour superconducting phase of a lump of dense quark matter. We calculate the surface energy of a domain wall separating the normal phase from the super phase with the bulk equilibrium maintained by a critical external magnetic field. Because of the symmetry of the problem, we are able to simplify the Ginzburg-Landau equations and express them in terms of two components of the di-quark condensate and one component of the gauge potential. The equations also contain two dimensionless parameters: the Ginzburg-Landau parameter κ and ρ. The main result of this paper is a set of inequalities obeyed by the critical value of the GinzburgLandau parameter-the value of κ for which the surface energy changes sign-and its derivative with respect to ρ. In addition we prove a number of inequalities of the functional dependence of the surface energy on the parameters of the problem and obtain a numerical solution of the Ginzburg-Landau equations. Finally a criterion for the types of colour superconductivity (type I or type II) is established in the weak coupling approximation. †

T-Duality is a poorly understood symmetry of the space-time fields of string theory that interchanges long and short distances. It is best understood in the context of toroidal compactification where, loosely speaking, radii of the torus are inverted. Even in this case, however, conventional techniques permit an understanding of the transformations only in the case where the metric on the torus is endowed with Abelian Killing symmetries. Attempting to apply these techniques to a general metric appears to yield a non-local world-sheet theory that would defy interpretation in terms of space-time fields. However, there is now available a simple but powerful general approach to understanding the symmetry transformations of string theory, which are generated by certain similarity transformations of the stress-tensors of the associated conformal field theories. We apply this method to the particular case of T-Duality and i) rederive the known transformations, ii) prove that the problem of non-locality is illusory, iii) give an explicit example of the transformation of a metric that lacks Killing symmetries and iv) derive a simple transformation rule for arbitrary string fields on tori. †

We calculate the magnetic polarization tensor of the photon and of the gluons in a two flavor color superconductor with a LOFF pairing that consists of a single plane wave. We show that at zero temperature and within the range of the values of the Fermi sea displacement that favors the LOFF state, all the eigenvalues of the magnetic polarization tensor are non-negative. Therefore the chromomagnetic instabilities pertaining to a gapless color superconductor disappear. 1