High-density quark matter under stress Original Research Article

We study the effect of SU(3)-flavor breaking on high-density quark matter. We discuss, in particular, a nonzero 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 View the MathML source and the critical strange-quark mass as ms∼m1/3Δ2/3, where m is the light-quark mass, Δ is the gap, and pF is the Fermi momentum. We note that parametrically, both the critical μe and ms2/(2pF) are much smaller than the gap.