Instabilities in superconducting and superfluid matter

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dirk H. Rischke
• Subject Area: Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, Fields
• Term: from 2005 to 2008
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 18448644

Under conditions realized in central regions of compact stellar objects, such as neutron stars, dense baryonic matter is likely to have a very rich phase structure. Such matter could be deconfined and color-superconducting. The presence of an isospin (flavor) asymmetry in neutral and (-equilibrated matter gives rise to phases with unconventional Cooper pairing. Recent theoretical studies revealed several such possibilities. Similar phases were also conjectured to appear in very cold trapped gases of fermionic atoms, such as 6Li and 40K. The fundamental problem in these studies is that,a number of the proposed unconventional phases are unstable, so that they cannot describe the ground state of matter. While several, seemingly stable, alternative phases have been proposed, no satisfactory solution to the problem has been presented yet. In this project, we plan to pursue several systematic approaches to investigate this issue in detail, and to determine the true ground state of matter in various regimes of dense quark matter and of cold fermionic gases when the conventional Cooper pairing mechanism cannot be realized.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Dr. Igor Shovkovy