  We present a detailed study of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) gap
equation ``replicae'' or excited vacuum states, orthogonal to the ground-state
one, in the chiral-quark sector of the Hamiltonian Coulomb-gauge model of
chromodynamics. Analyzing the number of negative eigenmodes of the energy
density's Hessian we believe that we have identified all of the (negative
energy-density) vacua of this nonlinear system, namely the ground BCS state and
two (or one) replicae for slightly massive (or massless) quarks, given the
interaction strength typical of the strong interactions. The meson spectrum
over each of the replicae looks similar, so the differences are not significant
enough given model uncertainties, but matrix elements are more sensitive and
allow to distinguish them. We propose to look for such excited vacua in lattice
gauge theory by trying to identify excitations with scalar quantum numbers
which have energies proportional to the lattice volume (unlike conventional
mesons for which the mass stabilizes to a constant upon taking the infinite
volume limit).
