Inhomogeneous superconductors and inhomogeneous superfluids appear in a variety of contexts including quark matter at extreme densities, fermionic systems of cold atoms, type-II cuprates, and organic superconductors. In the present review the focus is on properties of quark matter at high baryonic density, which may exist in the interior of compact stars. The conditions realized in these stellar objects tend to disfavor standard symmetric BCS pairing and may favor an inhomogeneous color superconducting phase. The properties of inhomogeneous color superconductors are discussed in detail and in particular of crystalline color superconductors. The possible astrophysical signatures associated with the presence of crystalline color superconducting phases within the core of compact stars are also reviewed.

We give a pedagogical review of the properties of the various meson condensation phases triggered by a large isospin or strangeness imbalance. We argue that these phases are extremely interesting and powerful playground for exploring the properties of hadronic matter. The reason is that they are realized in a regime in which various theoretical methods overlap with increasingly precise numerical lattice QCD simulations, providing insight on the properties of color confinement and of chiral symmetry breaking.

Glitches, spin-up events in neutron stars, are of prime interest, as they reveal properties of nuclear matter at subnuclear densities. We numerically investigate the glitch mechanism due to vortex unpinning using analogies between neutron stars and dipolar supersolids. We explore the vortex and crystal dynamics during a glitch and its dependence on the supersolid quality, providing a tool to study glitches from different radial depths of a neutron star. Benchmarking our theory against neutron-star observations, our work will open a new avenue for the quantum simulation of stellar objects from Earth.

We develop a numerical algorithm for the solution of the Sturm-Liouville differential equation governing the stationary radial oscillations of nonrotating compact stars. Our algorithm is based on the Numerov’s method that turns the Sturm-Liouville differential equation in an eigenvalue problem. In our development, we provide a strategy to correctly deal with the star boundaries and the interfaces between layers with different mechanical properties. Assuming that the fluctuations obey the same equation of state of the background, we analyze various different stellar models and we precisely determine hundreds of eigenfrequencies and of eigenmodes. If the equation of state does not present an interface discontinuity, the fundamental radial eigenmode becomes unstable exactly at the critical central energy density corresponding to the largest gravitational mass. However, in the presence of an interface discontinuity, there exist stable configurations with a central density exceeding the critical one and with a smaller gravitational mass.

It has recently been claimed, with a $4.2\sigma$ significance level, that gravitational wave echoes at a frequency of about 72 Hz have been produced in the GW170817 event. The merging of compact stars can lead to the emission of gravitational wave echoes if the postmerger object features a photon sphere capable of partially trapping the gravitational waves. If the postmerger source is a black hole, a second internal reflection surface, associated with quantum effects near the black hole horizon, must be present to avoid the gravitational wave capture. Alternatively, gravitational wave echoes can be produced by ultracompact stars crossing the photon-sphere line in the mass-radius diagram during the neutron star merging. In this case, the second reflection surface is not needed. A recently proposed preliminary analysis using an incompressible (and so unphysical) equation of state suggests that gravitational wave echoes at a frequency of tens of hertz can be produced by an ultracompact star. Since strange stars are extremely compact, we examine the possibility that strange stars emit gravitational wave echoes at such a frequency. Using parametrized models of the equation of state of ultrastiff quark matter we find that a strange star can emit gravitational wave echoes, but the corresponding frequencies are on the order of tens of hilohertz, and thus not compatible with the 72 Hz signal.