Abstract
Alice and Boojums are both representative characters created by Lewis Carroll. We show that they possibly meet in cores of rotating neutron stars. Recent studies of quark-hadron continuity suggest that neutron superfluid matter can connect smoothly to two-flavor symmetric quark matter at high densities. We study how this can be maintained in the presence of the vortices. In the neutron matter, quantized superfluid vortices arise. In the two-flavor dense quark matter, vortices carrying color magnetic fluxes together with fractionally quantized superfluid circulations appear as the most stable configuration, and we call these as the non-Abelian Alice strings. We show that three integer neutron superfluid vortices and three non-Abelian Alice strings of different color magnetic fluxes with total color flux canceled out are joined at a junction called a Boojum.
Highlights
Neutron stars, pulsars, provide us with a unique opportunity to study states of matter under extreme conditions: highest known baryon density in the universe, rapid rotation, strong magnetic fields, etc
We show that three integer neutron superfluid vortices and three nonAbelian Alice strings of different color magnetic fluxes with total color flux canceled out are joined at a junction called a Boojum
We address the combined effect of high-density and rapid rotation; namely the quantum vortices that appear in the neutron superfluid and the color-superconducting quark matter
Summary
Pulsars, provide us with a unique opportunity to study states of matter under extreme conditions: highest known baryon density in the universe, rapid rotation, strong magnetic fields, etc (see, e.g., Refs. [1,2,3] for reviews). The idea of crossover construction of the EoS can be traced back to the concept of quark-hadron continuity between the CFL phase and the hyperon superfluid phase [21] (see [22,23,24,25,26]). [28] that three non-Abelian vortices, which carry different color magnetic fluxes with total color canceled out, must joint at one point to three integer vortices in the hyperonic matter Such a junction point of vortices is called a colorful Boojum [39,40]; originally, the similar structures found in helium superfluids were named Boojums by Mermin [42,43] and have been predicted to occur in 3He superfluids [45] in particular at the A-B phase boundary [46,47], liquid crystals [48], BoseEinstein condensates [49], and quantum field theory [50]. We show that in the two-flavor quarkhadron continuity picture, three Alice strings with red, blue, green color magnetic fluxes in two-flavor quark matter must join at a junction point to three integer vortices in 3P2 neutron matter, forming a colorful Boojum
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