A Diagrammatic Approach to Crystalline Color Superconductivity

We present a derivation of the gap equation for the crystalline color superconducting phase of QCD which begins from a one-loop Schwinger-Dyson equation written using a Nambu-Gorkov propagator modified to describe the spatially varying condensate. Some aspects of previous variational calculations become more straightforward when rephrased beginning from a diagrammatic starting point. This derivation also provides a natural base from which to generalize the analysis to include quark masses, nontrivial crystal structures, gluon propagation at asymptotic densities, and nonzero temperature. In this paper, we analyze the effects of nonzero temperature on the crystalline color superconducting phase.