Abstract
Quark-hadron continuity with two-flavor quarks that was proposed recently connects hadronic matter with neutron superfluidity and two-flavor dense quark matter. This two-flavor dense quark phase consists of the coexistence of the 2SC condensates and the -wave diquark condensates of -quarks, which gives rise to color superconductivity as well as superfluidity. We classify vortices in this phase. The most stable vortices are what we call the non-Abelian Alice strings, which are superfluid vortices with non-Abelian color magnetic fluxes therein, exhibiting so-called topological obstruction, or a non-Abelian generalization of the Alice property. We show that a single Abelian superfluid vortex is unstable against decay into three non-Abelian Alice strings. We discover that a non-Abelian Alice string carries orientational moduli of the real projective space corresponding to the color flux therein in the presence of the -wave condensates alone. We calculate Aharanov-Bohm (AB) phases around the non-Abelian Alice string, and find that the 2SC condensates and string’s orientational moduli must be aligned with each other because of single-valuedness of the AB phases of the 2SC condensates.
- Received 26 November 2020
- Accepted 9 February 2021
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.054002
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society