2005/09/30 by Prashanth Jaikumar, Craig D. Roberts, Armen Sedrakian · 52 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Neutrino #Nuclear physics #Particle physics #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quark #Strange matter #astro-ph #hep-ph #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevc.73.042801
published in Physical Review C 73(4) (American Institute of Physics) · 5 pages, 2 figures; to appear in Phys. Rev. C (Rapid Comm.)
arxiv created 2006/03/07 · openalex publication_date 2006/04/05 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
If deconfined quark matter exists inside compact stars, the primary cooling mechanism is neutrino radiation via the direct Urca processes d\ensuremath→u+e+\ensuremathνe and u+e\ensuremath→d+\ensuremathνe. Below a critical temperature, Tc, quark matter forms a color superconductor, one possible manifestation of which is a condensate of \ensuremath⟨ud\ensuremath⟩ quark Cooper pairs in an electric-charge neutralizing background of electrons. We compute the neutrino emission rate from such a phase, including charged pair-breaking and recombination effects, and find that on a material temperature domain below Tc the pairing-induced suppression of the neutrino emission rate is not uniformly exponential. If gapless modes are present in the condensed phase, the emissivity at low temperatures is moderately enhanced above that of completely unpaired matter. The importance of charged current pair-breaking processes for neutrino emission both in the fully gapped and partially gapped regimes is emphasized.