The color flavor locked phase in the chromodielectric model and quark stars

Abstract

Recent results obtained in the Chromodielectric Model (CDM) have shown that strange quark matter at very high densities may appear in two phases, namely a chiral broken and a chiral symmetric phase, which may not be absolutely stable. In the chiral symmetric phase, the abundance of the quarks flavors u, d and s is the same and there are no electrons. In this paper we study an extended version of the Chromodielectric model (CDM) with a BCS quark pairing implemented, and analyze the superconducting color flavor locked phase. We show that the inclusion in the free energy density of a negative term of the diquark condensate guarantees the stability of quark matter. We also analyze the phase transition between matter described by different equations of state and only find a first order transition, at a very low pressure, from the CFL phase to the unpaired strange quark matter, which opens the possibility for a quark-hadron phase transition. Our study has implications in astrophysics, in particular regarding the formation and the structure of compact quark stars. We explicitly show that CFL stars can be absolutely stable and more compact than strange stars.