Delineating the properties of matter in cold, dense QCD

Understand

The properties of dense QCD matter are delineated through the construction of equations of state which should be consistent with QCD calculations in the low and high density limits, nuclear laboratory experiments, and the neutron star observations.

• These constraints, together with the causality condition of the sound velocity, are used to develop the picture of hadron-quark continuity in which hadronic matter continuously transforms into quark matter (modulo small 1st order phase transitions).
• For hadronic matter (at baryon density nB > ~2n0 with n0 ~ 0.16 fm^(-3) being the nuclear saturation density) we use equations of state by Togashi et al.
• based on microscopic variational many-body calculations, and for quark matter (nB > ~5n0) we construct equations of state using a schematic quark model (with strangeness) whose interactions are motivated by the hadron phenomenology.