Absence of two-flavor color-superconductivity in compact stars

By M. Alford, Kumbakonam R. Rajagopal. 2002

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The simplest pattern of color superconductivity involves BCS pairing between up and down quarks. We argue that this `2SC' phase will not arise within a compact star. A macroscopic volume of quark matter must be electrically neutral and must be a color singlet. Satisfying these requirements imposes a significant free energy cost on the 2SC phase, but not on color-flavor locked (CFL) quark matter, in which up, down and strange quarks all pair. As a function of increasing density, therefore, one may see a single phase transition from hadronic matter directly to CFL quark matter. Alternatively, there may be an intervening phase in which the different flavors self-pair, or pair with each other in a non-BCS pattern, such as in a crystalline color superconductor.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atmospheric Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c5f32191cc8c89bb644f08cb47e07f46a5a2589d

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Citations in the corpus

Hybrid Stars that Masquerade as Neutron Stars (2004, background): “…the strange quark mass becomes nonnegligible relative to the chemical potential, and at m2s / ¼ 4 there is a transition to unpaired quark matter (Alford & Rajagopal 2002).2 When we include the nuclear matter, there is a three-way competition between nuclear matter, unpaired quark matter, and…”
The phase diagram of dense QCD (2010, background): “At a high density where the expansions in terms of ms/μq and /μq are valid, model-independent conclusions can be drawn for the CSC quark matter at T = 0 [187, 188].”