Alice meets Boojums in neutron stars: vortices penetrating two-flavor quark-hadron continuity

Abstract

Alice and Boojums are both representative characters created by Lewis Carroll. We show that they possibly meet in cores of rotating neutron stars. Recent studies of quark-hadron continuity suggest that neutron superfluid matter can connect smoothly to two-flavor symmetric quark matter at high densities. We study how this can be maintained in the presence of the vortices. In the neutron matter, quantized superfluid vortices arise. In the two-flavor dense quark matter, vortices carrying color magnetic fluxes together with fractionally quantized superfluid circulations appear as the most stable configuration, and we call these as the non-Abelian Alice strings. We show that three integer neutron superfluid vortices and three non-Abelian Alice strings of different color magnetic fluxes with total color flux canceled out are joined at a junction called a Boojum.

6 pages, 1 figure, references added

References in corpus (22)

• GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral
• Shapiro delay measurement of a two solar mass neutron star
• A Massive Pulsar in a Compact Relativistic Binary
• PSR J0030+0451 Mass and Radius from NICER Data and Implications for the Properties of Neutron Star Matter
• A NICER View of PSR J0030+0451: Millisecond Pulsar Parameter Estimation
• GW190425: Observation of a Compact Binary Coalescence with Total Mass $\sim 3.4M_{\odot }$
• Color superconductivity in dense quark matter
• New Critical Point Induced by the Axial Anomaly in Dense QCD
• All Exact Solutions of a 1/4 Bogomol'nyi-Prasad-Sommerfield Equation
• Phenomenological QCD equation of state for massive neutron stars
• Phase structure, collective modes, and the axial anomaly in dense QCD
• Creating vortons and three-dimensional skyrmions from domain wall annihilation with stretched vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates
• Colorful boojums at the interface of a color superconductor
• Higgs-confinement phase transitions with fundamental representation matter
• Analogues of D-branes in Bose-Einstein condensates
• Spectral Continuity in Dense QCD
• Vortex structure of a neutron star with CFL quark core
• Non-Abelian Alice strings in two-flavor dense QCD
• The effective action of a BPS Alice string
• Continuity from neutron matter to color-superconducting quark matter with ${}^3{P}_2$ superfluidity
• Pulsar glitches from quantum vortex networks
• Confinement and moduli locking of Alice strings and monopoles

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Topological confinement of vortices in two-flavor dense QCD
• Chiral non-Abelian vortices and their confinement in three flavor dense QCD
• Non-Abelian Anyons and Non-Abelian Vortices in Topological Superconductors
• Core structures of vortices in Ginzburg-Landau theory for neutron ${}^3{P}_2$ superfluids
• Proximity effects of vortices in neutron ${}^3{P}_2$ superfluids in neutron stars: Vortex core transitions and covalent bonding of vortex molecules
• Chiral non-Abelian vortex molecules in dense QCD