Dense matter in compact stars - A pedagogical introduction

Understand

Cold and dense nuclear and/or quark matter can be found in the interior of compact stars.

• It is very challenging to determine the ground state and properties of this matter because of the strong-coupling nature of QCD.
• I give a pedagogical introduction to microscopic calculations based on phenomenological models, effective theories, and perturbative QCD.
• I discuss how the results of these calculations can be related to astrophysical observations to potentially rule out or confirm candidate phases of dense matter.