Abstract
We show that Z3-valued particle-vortex braiding phases are present in high density quark matter. Certain mesonic and baryonic excitations, in the presence of a superfluid vortex, have orbital angular momentum quantized in units of ℏ/3. Such nonlocal topological features can distinguish phases whose realizations of global symmetries, as probed by local order parameters, are identical. If Z3 braiding phases and angular momentum fractionalization are absent in lower density hadronic matter, as is widely expected, then the quark matter and hadronic matter regimes of dense QCD must be separated by at least one phase transition.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 034015 |
| Journal | Physical Review D |
| Volume | 100 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 12 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Mark Alford, Paulo Bedaque, Tyler Ellison, Zohar Komargodski, Sanjay Reddy, Martin Savage, Sujeet Shukla, Boris Spivak, Naoki Yamamoto, and especially Lukasz Fidkowski for helpful conversations. This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy Grants No. DE-SC-0011637 and No. DE-FG02-00ER-41132.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" 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 SCOAP