Non-Abelian Alice strings in two-flavor dense QCD

Abstract

Quark-hadron continuity with two-flavor quarks that was proposed recently connects hadronic matter with neutron ${}^3{P}_2$ superfluidity and two-flavor dense quark matter. This two-flavor dense quark phase consists of the coexistence of the 2SC condensates and the $P$-wave diquark condensates of $d$-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 $\mathbb{R}{P}^2$ corresponding to the color flux therein in the presence of the $P$-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.

14 pages, 4 figures; v2: published version

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Core structures of vortices in Ginzburg-Landau theory for neutron ${}^3{P}_2$ superfluids
• Confinement and moduli locking of Alice strings and monopoles