Holographic approach to compact stars and their binary mergers

TL;DR

This review explores how holographic duality can be used to understand dense QCD matter in compact stars and their mergers, highlighting current results, limitations, and future prospects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of holographic methods applied to dense matter in astrophysical objects, emphasizing recent advances and open challenges.

Findings

Holography offers insights into strongly interacting dense matter.

Limitations exist in modeling real QCD with holography.

Future holographic models may improve understanding of compact-star physics.

Abstract

In this review article, we describe the role of holography in deciphering the physics of dense QCD matter, relevant for the description of compact stars and their binary mergers. We review the strengths and limitations of the holographic duality in describing strongly interacting matter at large baryon density, walk the reader through the most important results derived using the holographic approach so far, and highlight a number of outstanding open problems in the field. Finally, we discuss how we foresee holography contributing to compact-star physics in the coming years.