The CFL phase has several remarkable properties.
* It breaks chiral symmetry.
* It is a superfluid.
* It is an electromagnetic insulator, in which there is a "rotated" photon, containing a small admixture of one of the gluons.
* It has the same symmetries as sufficiently dense hyperonic matter.
There are several variants of the CFL phase, representing distortions of the pairing structure in response to external stresses such as a difference between the mass of the strange quark and the mass of the up and down quarks.