  It has been argued by Buckley et. al.(Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 151102, 2004) that
nuclear matter is a type-I rather than a type-II superconductor. The suggested
mechanism is a strong interaction between neutron and proton Cooper pairs,
which arises from an assumed U(2) symmetry of the effective potential, which is
supposed to originate in isospin symmetry of the underlying nuclear
interactions. To test this claim, we perform an explicit mean-field calculation
of the effective potential of the Cooper pairs in a model with a simple
four-point pairing interaction. In the neutron star context, matter is very
neutron rich with less than 10% protons, so there is no neutron-proton pairing.
We find that under these conditions our model shows no interaction between
proton Cooper pairs and neutron Cooper pairs at the mean-field level. We
estimate the leading contribution beyond mean field and find that it is is
small and attractive at weak coupling.
