The Quarkyonic Star

Understand

We discuss theoretical scenarios on crossover between nuclear matter (NM) and quark matter (QM).

• We classify various possibilities into three major scenarios according to the onset of diquark degrees of freedom that characterizes color-superconducting (CSC) states.
• In the conventional scenario NM occurs at the liquid-gas (or liquid-vacuum at zero temperature) phase transition and QM occurs next, after which CSC eventually appears.
• With the effect of strong correlation, the BEC-BCS scenario implies that CSC occurs next to NM and QM comes last in the BCS regime.