Unlocking color and flavor in superconducting strange quark matter Original Research Article

We explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter with massless u and d quarks as a function of the strange quark mass ms and the chemical potential μ for baryon number. Neglecting electromagnetism, we describe the different baryonic and quark matter phases at zero temperature. For quark matter, we support our model-independent arguments with a quantitative analysis of a model which uses a four-fermion interaction abstracted from single-gluon exchange. For any finite ms, at sufficiently large μ we find quark matter in a color-flavor-locked state which leaves a global vector-like SU(2)color+L+R symmetry unbroken. As a consequence, chiral symmetry is always broken in sufficiently dense quark matter. As the density is reduced, for sufficiently large ms we observe a first-order transition from the color-flavor-locked phase to color superconducting phase analogous to that in two-flavor QCD. At this unlocking transition chiral symmetry is restored. For realistic values of ms our analysis indicates that chiral symmetry breaking may be present for all densities down to those characteristic of baryonic matter. This supports the idea that quark matter and baryonic matter may be continuously connected in nature. We map the gaps at the quark Fermi surfaces in the high density color-flavor-locked phase onto gaps at the baryon Fermi surfaces at low densities.