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At sufficiently high baryon densities, the physics of a dense quark-gluon plasma may be investigated through the tools of perturbative QCD. This approach has recently been successfully applied to the study of color superconductivity, where the dominant di-quark pairing interaction arises from one gluon exchange. Screening in the plasma leads to novel behaviour, including a remarkable non-BCS scaling of T_C, the transition temperature to the color superconducting phase. Radiative corrections to one gluon exchange were previously considered and found to affect T_C. In particular, the quark self-energy in a plasma leads to non-Fermi liquid behaviour and suppresses T_C. However, at the same time, the quark-gluon vertex was shown not to modify the result at leading order. This dichotomy between the effects of the radiative corrections at first appears rather surprising, as the BRST identity connects the self-energy to the vertex corrections. Nevertheless, as we demonstrate, there is in fact no contradiction with the BRST identity, at least to leading log order. This clarifies some of the previous statements on the importance of the higher order corrections to the determination of T_C and the zero temperature gap in color superconductivity., Comment: 21 pages, 5 eps figures, REVTeX 3.1, minor corrections made

Recent interest in the study of color superconductivity has focused on the regime of high baryon density where perturbative QCD may be employed. Based on the dominant one-gluon-exchange interaction, both the transition temperature and zero temperature gap have been determined to leading order in the coupling, g. While the leading non-BCS behavior, $T_C\sim\mu g^{-5}e^{-\kappa/g}$, is easily obtained, the pre-exponential factor has proved more difficult to evaluate. Focusing on the transition temperature, we present a perturbative derivation of this factor, exact to leading order in g. This approach is first motivated by the study of a toy model and involves working to second order in the perturbative expansion. We compare this result to the zero temperature gap. Additionally, we extend the analysis to the case of higher angular momentum for longitudinal and transverse quark pairing., Comment: 37 pages, 5 figures (revtex v3.1)

We extend the gauge invariant variational approach of Phys. Rev. D52 (1995) 3719, hep-th/9408081, to theories with fermions. As the simplest example we consider the massless Schwinger model in 1+1 dimensions. We show that in this solvable model the simple variational calculation gives exact results., Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure

Color superconductivity is a possible phase of high density QCD. We present a systematic derivation of the transition temperature, T_C, from the QCD Lagrangian through study of the di-quark proper vertex. With this approach, we confirm the dependence of T_C on the coupling g, namely $T_C \sim \mu g^{-5} e^{-\kappa/g}$, previously obtained from the one-gluon exchange approximation in the superconducting phase. The diagrammatic approach we employ allows us to examine the perturbative expansion of the vertex and the propagators. We find an additional O(1) contribution to the prefactor of the exponential from the one-loop quark self energy and that the other one-loop radiative contributions and the two gluon exchange vertex contribution are subleading., Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, revtex, details and discussion expanded

We analyze the instanton transitions in the framework of the gauge invariant variational calculation in the pure Yang-Mills theory. Instantons are identified with the saddle points in the integration over the gauge group which projects the Gaussian wave functional onto the gauge invariant physical Hilbert space. We show that the dynamical mass present in the best variational state provides an infrared cutoff for the instanton sizes. The instantons of the size $\rho<1/M$ are suppressed and the large size instanton problem arising in the standard WKB calculation is completely avoided in the present variational framework., Comment: 16 pages RevTeX, 5 EPS figures. Minor changes. To appear in Phys. Rev. D

The variational ansatz for the ground state wavefunctional of QCD is found to capture the anti-screening behaviour that contributes the dominant `-4' to the beta-function and leads to asymptotic freedom. By considering an SU(N) purely gauge theory in the Hamiltonian formalism and choosing the Coulomb gauge, the origins of all screening and anti-screening contributions in gluon processes are found in terms of the physical degrees of freedom. The overwhelming anti- screening contribution of `-4' is seen to originate in the renormalisation of a Coulomb interaction by a transverse gluon. The lesser screening contribution of `1/3' is seen to originate in processes involving transverse gluon interactions. It is thus apparent how the variational ansatz must be developed to capture the full running of the QCD coupling constant., Comment: 35 pages, 11 figures, LaTeX

The beta-function is calculated for an SU(N) Yang-Mills theory from an ansatz for the vacuum wavefunctional. Direct comparison is made with the results of calculations of the beta-function of QCD. In both cases the theories are asymptotically free. The only difference being in the numerical coefficient of the beta-function, which is found to be -4 from the ansatz and -4+1/3 from other QCD calculations. This is because, due to the constraint of Gauss' law applied to the wavefunctional, transverse gluons (which contribute the 1/3) are omitted. The renormalisation procedure is understood in terms of `tadpole' and `horse-shoe' Feynman diagrams which must be interpreted with a non-local propagator., Comment: 23 pages, LaTex, 2 figs

We discuss three dimensional compact QED with a theta term due to an axionic field. The variational gauge invariant functional is considered and it is shown that the ground state energy is independent of theta in a leading approximation. The mass gap of the axionic field is found to be dependent upon theta, the mass gap of the photon field and the scalar potential. The vacuum expectation of the Wilson loop is shown to be independent of theta in a leading approximation, to obey the area law and to lead to confinement. We also briefly discuss the properties of axionic confining strings., Comment: 35 pages, LaTex, typing error corrected