Color-flavor locked strange matter

We analyze and quantify how the color-flavor locked (CFL) phase in dense matter enhances the parameter space for absolute stability (strange matter). We find that the “CFL strange matter” phase can be the true ground state of hadronic matter for a much wider range of the parameters of the model (the gap of the QCD Cooper pairs $\Delta ,$ the strange quark mass $m_s,$ and the bag constant $B)$ than the state without any pairing, and derive a full equation of state and an accurate analytic approximation to the lowest order in $\Delta$ and $m_s$ which may be directly used for applications. The effects of pairing on the equation of state are found to be small (as previously expected), but not negligible, and may be relevant for astrophysics.