Instanton Effects in QCD at High Baryon Density

We study instanton effects in QCD at very high baryon density. In this regime instantons are suppressed by a large power of (ΛQCD/μ), where ΛQCD is the QCD scale parameter and μ is the baryon chemical potential. Instantons are nevertheless important because they contribute to several physical observables that vanish to all orders in perturbative QCD. We study, in particular, the chiral condensate and its contribution m2GB ∼ m〈ψ̄ψ〉 to the masses of Goldstone bosons in the CFL phase of QCD with Nf = 3 flavors. We find that at densities ρ ∼ (5 − 10)ρ0, where ρ0 is the density of nuclear matter, the result is dominated by large instantons and subject to considerable uncertainties. We suggest that these uncertainties can be addressed using lattice calculations of the instanton density and the pseudoscalar diquark mass in QCD with two colors. We study the topological susceptibility and WittenVeneziano type mass relations in both Nc = 2 and Nc = 3 QCD.