Functional renormalization group approach to color superconducting phase transition

Abstract

Abstract We investigate the order of the color superconducting phase transition using the functional renormalization group approach. We analyze the Ginzburg-Landau effective theory of color superconductivity and more generic scalar SU(N c) gauge theories by calculating the β function of the gauge coupling in arbitrary dimension d based on two different regularization schemes. We find that in d = 3, due to gluon fluctuation effects, the β function never admits an infrared fixed point solution. This indicates that, unlike the ordinary superconducting transition, color superconductivity can only show a first-order phase transition.