text: Unlike an electrical superconductor, color-superconducting quark matter comes in many varieties, each of which is a separate phase of matter. This is because quarks, unlike electrons, come in many species.  There are three different colors (red, green, blue) and in the core of a compact star we expect three different flavors (up, down, strange), making nine species in all. Thus in forming the Cooper pairs there is a --> 9×9 color-flavor matrix of possible pairing patterns. The differences between these patterns are very physically significant: different patterns break different symmetries of the underlying theory, leading to different excitation spectra and different transport properties.
  It is very hard to predict which pairing patterns will be favored in nature. In principle this question could be decided by a QCD calculation, since QCD is the theory that fully describes the strong interaction. In the limit of infinite density, where the strong interaction becomes weak because of asymptotic freedom, controlled calculations can be performed, and it is known that the favored phase in three-flavor quark matter is the color-flavor-locked phase. But at the densities that exist in nature these calculations are unreliable, and the only known alternative is the brute-force computational approach of lattice QCD, which unfortunately has a technical difficulty (the "sign problem") that renders it useless for calculations at high quark density and low temperature.
  Physicists are currently pursuing the following lines of research on color superconductivity:
  * Performing calculations in the infinite density limit, to get some idea of the behavior at one edge of the phase diagram.
  * Performing calculations of the phase structure down to medium density using a highly simplified model of QCD, the Nambu–Jona-Lasinio (NJL) model, which is not a controlled approximation, but is expected to yield semi-quantitative insights.
  * Writing down an effective theory for the excitations of a given phase, and using it to calculate the physical properties of that phase.
  * Performing astrophysical calculations, using NJL models or effective theories, to see if there are observable signatures by which one could confirm or rule out the presence of specific color superconducting phases in nature (i.e. in compact stars: see next section).