6 research outputs found
Photons in gapless color-flavor-locked quark matter
We calculate the Debye and Meissner masses of a gauge boson in a material
consisting of two species of massless fermions that form a condensate of Cooper
pairs. We perform the calculation as a function of temperature, for the cases
of neutral Cooper pairs and charged Cooper pairs, and for a range of parameters
including gapped quaisparticles, and ungapped quasiparticles with both
quadratic and linear dispersion relations at low energy.
Our results are relevant to the behavior of photons and gluons in the gapless
color-flavor-locked phase of quark matter. We find that the photon's Meissner
mass vanishes, and the Debye mass shows a non-monotonic temperature dependence,
and at temperatures of order the pairing gap it drops to a minimum value of
order sqrt(alpha) times the quark chemical potential. We confirm previous
claims that at zero temperature an imaginary Meissner mass can arise from a
charged gapless condensate, and we find that at finite temperature this can
also occur for a gapped condensate.Comment: 22 pages, LaTeX; expanded discussion of temperature dependenc
Gapless phases of color-superconducting matter
We discuss gapless color superconductivity for neutral quark matter in beta
equilibrium at zero as well as at nonzero temperature. Basic properties of
gapless superconductors are reviewed. The current progress and the remaining
problems in the understanding of the phase diagram of strange quark matter are
discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Plenary talk at Strangeness in Quark Matter 2004
(SQM2004), Cape Town, South Africa, 15-20 September 2004. Minor correction
Gapless CFL and its competition with mixed phases
We recently argued that as the density of quark matter decreases, there is a continuous transition from the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase to a gapless "gCFL" phase. The reason is the growing importance of the strange quark mass, and the constraint of electric/color neutrality. In this paper we discuss mixed phases that achieve neutrality by charge seperation, and might offer an alternative to the gCFL phase. We find that none of the obvious mixtures is favored relative to gCFL