Abstract
Quark-hadron continuity is a scenario in which hadronic matter is continuously connected to a color superconductor without phase transitions as the baryon chemical potential increases. This scenario is based on Landau’s classification of phases, since they have the same symmetry breaking pattern. We address the question of whether this continuity is true as quantum phases of matter, which requires treatment beyond the Ginzburg-Landau description. To examine the topological nature of a color superconductor, we derive a dual effective theory for U(1) Nambu-Goldstone (NG) bosons and vortices of the color-flavor locked phase and discuss the fate of emergent higher-form symmetries. The theory has the form of a topological BF theory coupled to NG bosons, and fractional statistics of test quarks and vortices arise as a result of an emergent two-form symmetry. We find that this symmetry cannot be spontaneously broken, indicating that quark-hadron continuity is still a consistent scenario.
- Received 4 December 2018
- Revised 7 February 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.212001
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP3.
Published by the American Physical Society