Magnetized color flavor locked state and compact stars

TL;DR

This paper investigates the stability of magnetized color flavor locked quark matter in neutron stars, finding it more stable than unpaired matter and exploring its implications for star structure.

Contribution

It demonstrates that magnetic fields enhance the stability of color flavor locked quark matter and analyzes the resulting mass-radius relations for neutron stars.

Findings

Magnetized color flavor locked matter has lower energy per baryon than unpaired matter.

Increasing magnetic field strength further stabilizes the color flavor locked phase.

The study suggests such matter could be the ground state inside neutron stars.

Abstract

The stability of the color flavor locked phase in the presence of a strong magnetic field is investigated within the phenomenological MIT bag model, taking into account the variation of the strange quark mass, the baryon density, the magnetic field, as well as the bag and gap parameters. It is found that the minimum value of the energy per baryon in a color flavor locked state at vanishing pressure is lower than the corresponding one for unpaired magnetized strange quark matter and, as the magnetic field increases, the energy per baryon decreases. This implies that magnetized color flavor locked matter is more stable and could become the ground state inside neutron stars. The mass-radius relation for such stars is also studied.