COMPACT STARS. “Unlike an electrical superconductor, color-superconducting quark matter comes in many varieties, each of which is a separate phase of matter. This is because quarks, unlike electrons, come in many species. There are three different colors (red, green, blue) and in the core of a compact star we expect three different flavors (up, down, strange), making nine species in all. Thus in forming the Cooper pairs there is a 9×9 color-flavor matrix of possible pairing patterns. The differences between these patterns are very physically significant: different patterns break different symmetries of the underlying theory, leading to different excitation spectra and different transport properties.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_superconductivity
linkedin post 2022-06-29 05:12:48
Nigel Fleming
September 21, 2022