Holographic quarkyonic matter

TL;DR

This paper introduces a holographic model of quarkyonic matter, showing it can coexist with baryons and fundamental quarks, and is energetically favored at high chemical potentials, with implications for QCD phases.

Contribution

It presents a new holographic configuration in the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model that realizes quarkyonic matter, a phase predicted in large-N_c QCD, with detailed phase transition analysis.

Findings

Quarkyonic matter is chirally symmetric in the model.

At high chemical potentials, it is energetically preferred over nuclear and quark matter.

The transition from nuclear to quarkyonic matter is first order at zero temperature.

Abstract

We point out a new configuration in the Witten-Sakai-Sugimoto model, allowing baryons in the pointlike approximation to coexist with fundamental quarks. The resulting phase is a holographic realization of quarkyonic matter, which is predicted to occur in QCD at a large number of colors, and possibly plays a role in real-world QCD as well. We find that holographic quarkyonic matter is chirally symmetric and that, for large baryon chemical potentials, it is energetically preferred over pure nuclear matter and over pure quark matter. The zero-temperature transition from nuclear matter to the quarkyonic phase is of first order in the chiral limit and for a realistic pion mass. For pion masses far beyond the physical point we observe a quark-hadron continuity due to the presence of quarkyonic matter.