Color superconductivity in dense quark matter

By M. Alford, Kumbakonam R. Rajagopal, T. Schaefer, A. Schmitt. 2000

629 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Matter at high density and low temperature is expected to be a color superconductor, which is a degenerate Fermi gas of quarks with a condensate of Cooper pairs near the Fermi surface that induces color Meissner effects. At the highest densities, where the QCD coupling is weak, rigorous calculations are possible, and the ground state is a particularly symmetric state, the color-flavor locked (CFL) phase. The CFL phase is a superfluid, an electromagnetic insulator, and breaks chiral symmetry. The effective theory of the low-energy excitations in the CFL phase is known and can be used, even at more moderate densities, to describe its physical properties. At lower densities the CFL phase may be disfavored by stresses that seek to separate the Fermi surfaces of the different flavors, and comparison with the competing alternative phases, which may break translation and/or rotation invariance, is done using phenomenological models. We review the calculations that underlie these results and then discuss transport properties of several color-superconducting phases and their consequences for signatures of color superconductivity in neutron stars.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Geophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5fb1f6df844a35e838cb011762f30423792fc6b0

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Citations in the corpus

The phase diagram of dense QCD (2010, background): “In the CFL phase for massless 3-flavours, one finds the following pattern [15, 88]: G = SU(3)C × SU(3)L × SU(3)R } {{ } ⊃ U(1)em ×U(1)B × Z(6)A, (48)”
Mapping the phases of quantum chromodynamics with beam energy scan (2019, background): “Much of the physics at asymptotically large μB can be addressed perturbatively, where color-flavor locking determines the ground state of QCD matter [79].”
Floquet approach to ℤ2 lattice gauge theories with ultracold atoms in optical lattices (2019, background): “particular in strongly-interacting regimes, where conventional computational methods are limited [8, 9].”
Superfluidity in nuclear systems and neutron stars (2018, background): “We will not discuss quark color superconductivity in this review, although it may have profound implications for neutron-star phenomenology; the interested reader is referred to the reviews (Alford et al., 2008; Anglani et al., 2014; Rajagopal and Wilczek, 2001).”
New Neutron Star Equation of State with Quark–Hadron Crossover (2019, background): “…including the generation of constituent quark masses owing to chiral symmetry breaking (strong quark–antiquark pairing) (Hatsuda & Kunihiro (1994)), quark–quark pairing leading to color superconductivity (Alford et al. (2008)), and the mutual interplay of these effects (Hatsuda et al. (2006)).”
Maximum mass of neutron stars and strange neutron-star cores (2012, methodology): “Other superconducting quark-matter states, different from 2SC and CFL, were also predicted (Alford et al. 2008), but they will not be considered here.”
Strongly correlated quantum fluids: ultracold quantum gases, quantum chromodynamic plasmas and holographic duality (2012, background): “Recent reviews of various issues related to quark matter and the QGP can be found in [20, 180–184] and the results of the experimental program at the RHIC at BNL are summarized in [185].”