Goldstone theory of gluon saturation in high energy QCD: From color glass to color superfluid condensate
Abstract
In the high energy Regge asymptotics of QCD, the rapid overpopulation of gluons leads to gluon saturation, characterized by nonperturbative semi-classical lumpy configurations of size 1/QS, where QS≫ ΛQCD is a dynamical semi-hard saturation scale. We discuss here a generalization of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework describing this phenomenon that is obtained by carefully treating the breaking of global symmetries by the condensate. In particular, we show that the breaking of a global subgroup of color results in a Goldstone effective field theory (EFT) whose dynamics is characterized by a Goldstone decay constant fG = √N QS, where N=O(1/αS) is the phase space occupancy of the condensate, which is large for αS(QS)≪ 1. Further, the coupling of these colored Goldstones to collinear gluon modes leads to a depletion of the condensate, thereby modifying the static shockwave scattering framework of the CGC on timescales controlled by fG. The CGC EFT on these longer time scales is a novel color superfluid. Low frequency modes with ω≤ αS QS in an external probe of the CGC are sensitive to superfluid dynamics, with interesting physical consequences for deeply inelastic scattering and ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions.
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BibTeX
@misc{nair2026goldstone,
title = {{Goldstone theory of gluon saturation in high energy QCD: From color glass to color superfluid condensate}},
author = {V. P. Nair and Raju Venugopalan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.05498},
eprint = {2611.05498},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05498},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Goldstone theory of gluon saturation in high energy QCD: From color glass to color superfluid condensate
AU - V. P. Nair
AU - Raju Venugopalan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/03
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.05498
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05498
AB - In the high energy Regge asymptotics of QCD, the rapid overpopulation of gluons leads to gluon saturation, characterized by nonperturbative semi-classical lumpy configurations of size 1/Q_S, where Q_S≫ Λ_QCD is a dynamical semi-hard saturation scale. We discuss here a generalization of the Color Glass Condensate (CGC) framework describing this phenomenon that is obtained by carefully treating the breaking of global symmetries by the condensate. In particular, we show that the breaking of a global subgroup of color results in a Goldstone effective field theory (EFT) whose dynamics is characterized by a Goldstone decay constant f_G = √N Q_S, where N=O(1/α_S) is the phase space occupancy of the condensate, which is large for α_S(Q_S)≪ 1. Further, the coupling of these colored Goldstones to collinear gluon modes leads to a depletion of the condensate, thereby modifying the static shockwave scattering framework of the CGC on timescales controlled by f_G. The CGC EFT on these longer time scales is a novel color superfluid. Low frequency modes with ω≤ α_S Q_S in an external probe of the CGC are sensitive to superfluid dynamics, with interesting physical consequences for deeply inelastic scattering and ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions.
ER -