Speaker
Description
Superfluid vortices in the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase of dense quark
matter are known to be energetically disfavored relative to well-separated
triplets of so-called semi-superfluid color flux tubes. In this talk we will
present results from our numerical stability analysis of superfluid vortices
in dense quark matter. After identifying (physical) regions of
metastability/instability in the parameter space of the couplings of our
effective theory, we will discuss the structure of the unstable mode
responsible for the decay in the case of vanishing gauge coupling. If a
neutron star features a superfluid quark matter core, our analysis indicates
that it is very likely that it would contain semi-superfluid vortices rather
than superfluid vortices. We will point out possible implications of our
results to neutron stars.
