High Density Quark Matter under Stress

We study the effect of SU(3) flavor breaking on high density quark matter. We discuss, in particular, the effect a non-zero electron chemical potential and a finite strange quark mass. We argue that these perturbations trigger pion or kaon condensation. The critical chemical potential behaves as μe ∼ √ mms∆/pF and the critical strange quark mass as ms ∼ m1/3∆2/3, where m is the light quark mass, ∆ is the gap, and pF is the Fermi momentum. We note that parametrically, both the critical μe and ms/(2pF ) are much smaller than the gap.