Hard loops, soft loops, and high density effective field theory Original Research Article

We study several issues related to the use of effective field theories in QCD at large baryon density. We show that the power counting is complicated by the appearance of two scales inside loop integrals. Hard dense loops involve the large scale μ2 and lead to phenomena such as screening and damping at the scale gμ. Soft loops only involve small scales and lead to superfluidity and non-Fermi liquid behavior at exponentially small scales. Four-fermion operators in the effective theory are suppressed by powers of 1/μ, but they get enhanced by hard loops. As a consequence their contribution to the pairing gap is only suppressed by powers of the coupling constant, and not powers of 1/μ. We determine the coefficients of four-fermion operators in the effective theory by matching quark–quark scattering amplitudes. Finally, we introduce a perturbative scheme for computing corrections to the gap parameter in the superfluid phase.