ep - p h / 01 12 06 8 v 1 5 D ec 2 00 1 Confinement and domain walls in high density quark matter

In this talk I will review some recent progress in our understanding of properties of high density quark matter. This talk is based mainly on the papers [1]–[4], done in collaboration with D. Rischke, M. Stephanov, and A. Zhitnitsky. In recent years, our knowledge of dense quark matter has considerably expanded. We now understand that, quark matter at high densities exhibits the phenomenon of color superconductivity, which determines the symmetry of the ground state and its infrared dynamics. In the simplest case of N f = 2 massless quarks, the ground state of at high baryon densities is the 2SC state [5], characterized by the condensation of diquark Cooper pairs. These pairs are antisymmetric in spin (α, β), flavor (i, j) and color (a, b):