Superfluid phases of quark matter. III. Supercurrents and vortices

Abstract

We study, within Ginzburg-Landau theory, the responses of three-flavor superfluid quark-gluon plasmas to external magnetic fields and rotation, in both the color-flavor locked and isoscalar color-antitriplet diquark phases near the critical temperature. Fields are incorporated in the gradient energy arising from long wavelength distortions of the condensate, via covariant derivatives to satisfy local gauge symmetries associated with color and electric charge. Magnetic vortex formation, in response to external magnetic fields, is possible only in the isoscalar phase; in the color-flavor locked phase, external magnetic fields are incompletely screened by the Meissner effect. On the other hand, rotation of the superfluid produces vortices in the color-flavor locked phase; in the isoscalar phase, it produces a London gluon-photon mixed field. We estimate the coherence and Meissner lengths and critical magnetic fields for the two phases.