Instabilities of Non-Abelian Vortices in Dense QCD

We construct a low-energy effective theory describing non-Abelian vortices in the color superconducting quark matter under stress. We demonstrate that all the vortices are radically unstable against decay into the only one type of vortices due to the potential term induced by the explicit flavor symmetry breaking by the strange quark mass. A simple analytical estimate for the lifetime of unstable vortices is provided under the controlled weak-coupling calculations. We briefly discuss the (non)existence of magnetic monopoles at high density.

Figure 1

Contour plot of the effective potential for the $\mathbf{C}{P}^2$ NG modes in the $|{\varphi }_2{|}^2\mathrm{\text{−}}|{\varphi }_3{|}^2$ plane. The color represents the height of the potential.