Speaker: Mark Alford (Washington University, St. Louis)

Color superconductivity: accomodating the strange quark

The densest predicted state of matter is color-superconducting quark matter, in which quarks near the Fermi surface form a condensate of Cooper pairs. This form of matter may well exist in the core of compact stars, and the search for signatures of its presence is an ongoing enterprise. I will review the essentials of color superconductivity, emphasizing the fundamentals of the underlying mechanism, and describing the symmetries of the ``color-flavor locked'' phase. I will then talk about how these ideas apply to real-world quark matter, where complications like the strange quark mass must be taken into account. Finally, I will discuss the prospects for obtaining evidence of quark matter in general, and color-superconducting quark matter in particular, from measurements of the mass and radius of compact stars.