Color superconductivity
Color superconductivity is a phenomenon where matter carries color charge without loss, on analogy to the way conventional superconductors can carry electric charge without loss. Color superconductivity is predicted to occur in quark matter if the baryon density is sufficiently high (i.e., well above the density and energies of an atomic nucleus) and the temperature is not too high (well below 1012 kelvins). Color superconducting phases are to be contrasted with the normal phase of quark matter, which is just a weakly interacting Fermi liquid of quarks. In theoretical terms, a color superconducting phase is a state in which the quarks near the Fermi surface become correlated in Cooper pairs, which condense. In phenomenological terms, a color superconducting phase breaks some of the symmetries of the underlying theory, and has a very different spectrum of excitations and very different transport properties from the normal phase. Description Analogy with superconducting metals It is well known that at low temperature many metals become superconductors. A metal can be viewed in part as a Fermi liquid of electrons, and below a critical temperature, an attractive phonon-mediated interaction between the electrons near the Fermi surface causes them to pair up and form a condensate of Cooper pairs, which via the Anderson–Higgs mechanism makes the photon massive, leading to characteristic behaviors of a superconductor: infinite conductivity and the exclusion of magnetic fields (Meissner effect). The crucial ingredients for this to occur are: a liquid of charged fermions. an attractive interaction between the fermions low temperature (below the critical temperature) These ingredients are also present in sufficiently dense quark matter, leading physicists to expect that something similar will happen in that context: quarks carry both electric charge and color charge; the strong interaction between two quarks is powerfully attractive; the critical temperature is expected to be given by the QCD scale, which is of order 100 MeV, or 1012 kelvins, the temperature of the universe a few minutes after the Big Bang, so quark matter that we may currently observe in compact stars or other natural settings will be below this temperature. The fact that a Cooper pair of quarks carries a net color charge, as well as a net electric charge, means that some of the gluons (which mediate the strong interaction just as photons mediate electromagnetism) become massive in a phase with a condensate of quark Cooper pairs, so such a phase is called a "color superconductor". Actually, in many color superconducting phases the photon itself does not become massive, but mixes with one of the gluons to yield a new massless "rotated photon". This is an MeV-scale echo of the mixing of the hypercharge and W3 bosons that originally yielded the photon at the TeV scale of electroweak symmetry breaking. Diversity of color superconducting phases 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)