Speaker: Jeff Bowers (MIT)

Crystalline color superconductivity

Cold dense quark matter is a color superconductor. In a context where the quark flavors have different number densities (as in a neutron star), the Cooper pair condensate can break translational invariance by forming a periodic crystalline structure, first described by Larkin, Ovchinnikov, Fulde, and Ferrell (LOFF) for an electronic superconductor. We show that at zero temperature the transition to the LOFF phase is first order and the preferred crystal pattern is face-centered cubic. This has implications for the physics of phonon modes and vortex pinning in crystalline quark matter.