Strange Goings on in Quark Matter

The study of hadronic matter at high baryon density has recently attracted a lot of interest. At zero baryon density chiral symmetry is broken by a quark-anti-quark condensate. At high density condensation in the quarkanti-quark channel is suppressed. Instead, attractive interactions in the color anti-symmetric quark-quark channel favor the formation of diquark condensates. As a consequence, cold dense quark matter is expected to be a color superconductor. The symmetry breaking pattern depends on the density, the number of quark flavors, and their masses. A particularly symmetric phase is the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase of three flavor quark matter. This phase is believed to be the true ground state of ordinary matter at very large density. The CFL phase is characterized by the order parameter