Gapless color-flavor-locked quark matter

The dependence of the flavored pairing pattern on the strange quark mass M_s at zero temperature was studied. It was observed that as the density decreases or M_s increases there was a quantum phase transition to a new "gapless color-flavor locked (gCFL) phase". The phenomenology of gCFL quark matter in compact states was dominated by the modes with energy less than or of order the temperature, in the range keV to hundreds of keV. It was found that at the transition, the dispersion relations of both gapless quasiparticles were quadratic, but for larger M_s ²/μ, one became linear while the other remained quadratic.