Gluons, tadpoles, and color neutrality in a two-flavor color superconductor

Abstract

Considering cold, dense quark matter with two massless quark flavors, we demonstrate how, in a self-consistent calculation in the framework of QCD, the condensation of Cooper pairs induces a non-vanishing background color field. This background color field has precisely the right magnitude to cancel tadpole contributions and thus ensures overall color neutrality of the two-flavor color superconductor.