Towards a holographic quark-hadron continuity

Abstract

We study dense nuclear and quark matter within a single microscopic approach, namely the holographic Sakai-Sugimoto model. Nuclear matter is described via instantons in the bulk, and we show that instanton interactions are crucial for a continuous connection of chirally broken and chirally symmetric phases. The continuous path from nuclear to quark matter includes metastable and unstable stationary points of the potential, while the actual chiral phase transition remains of first order, as in earlier approximations. We show that the model parameters can be chosen to reproduce low-density properties of nuclear matter and observe a non-monotonic behavior of the speed of sound as a function of the baryon chemical potential, as suggested by constraints from QCD and astrophysics.