Color superconductivity and quark stars

Abstract

The search for new phases of strange quark matter inside neutron stars has recently received a lot of attention since it has been shown that the attractive nature of the one gluon exchange interaction in QCD may produce a superconducting phase in quark matter. We study an extended version of the Chromodielectric model 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 ensures the stability of quark matter. We explore the implications of our results in the structure of compact quark stars and explicitly show that CFL stars can be absolutely stable and more compact than strange stars.