Dense QCD: a Holographic Dyonic Salt

Abstract

Dense QCD at zero temperature with a large number of colors is a crystal. We show that in the holographic dual description, the crystal is made out of pairs of dyons with $e=g=\pm 1$ charges in a salt-like arrangement. We argue that with increasing density the dyon masses and topological charges equalize, turning the salt-like configuration to a bcc of half-instantons. The latter is dual to a cubic crystal of half-skyrmions. We estimate the transition from an fcc crystal of instantons to a bcc crystal of dyons to about 3 times nuclear matter density with a dyon binding energy of about 180 MeV.