Drum vortons in high density QCD.pdf

a r X i v : h e p - p h / 0 2 1 2 0 7 4 v 2 1 5 O c t 2 0 0 3 Drum vortons in high density QCD Kirk B. W. Buckley, Max A. Metlitski, and Ariel R. Zhitnitsky Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1, Canada (Dated: February 1, 2008) Recently it was shown that high density QCD supports of number of topological defects. In particular, there are U(1)Y strings that arise due to K 0 condensation that occurs when the strange quark mass is relatively large. The unique feature of these strings is that they possess a nonzero K + condensate that is trapped on the core. In the following we will show that these strings (with nontrivial core structure) can form closed loops with conserved charge and currents trapped on the string world sheet. The presence of conserved charges allows these topological defects, called vortons, to carry angular momentum, which makes them classically stable objects. We also give arguments demonstrating that vortons carry angular momentum very efficiently (in terms of energy per unit angular momentum) such that they might be the important degrees of freedom in the cores of neutron stars. PACS numbers: I. INTRODUCTION In the high baryon density regime it is well established that QCD behaves like a BCS superconductor where the condensate of electron Cooper pairs is replaced by a diquark condensate which has a very specific struc- ture [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] (see [6] for a review of high density QCD). The presence of a condensate of quark Cooper pairs breaks certain symmetries which are respected at zero baryon density. Recently, it has been shown that a consequence of this symmetry breaking is the appearance of various topological defects [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. This leads to the exciting possibility that such objects (which do not exist in the standard model in the vacuum) may be present within the interior of compact stars where such large densities may be realized [13]. In addition to a diquark condensat