Speaker
Description
Recent observations of neutron stars provide insights into the equation of state of matter at high densities, where exotic phases may emerge. One candidate is color superconductivity, in which quarks form diquark pairs that condense. A first-principles understanding of diquark dynamics is therefore essential for interpreting astrophysical data. In this work, we present a self-consistent, first-principles study of the vacuum properties of scalar diquarks within QCD. Using the functional renormalization group, we demonstrate how high-energy quark and gluon degrees of freedom can be integrated out, yielding an effective low-energy description in terms of mesons and diquarks. Our approach predicts properties of a scalar diquark bound state, consistent with the quark-diquark picture of the nucleon. We further show how these results can be used to constrain low-energy models of color superconductivity, providing new insights into the equation of state of cold and dense quark matter.