The Equation of State for Cold and Dense Strongly Interacting Matter

Abstract

We discuss recent results for the equation of state for cold and dense strongly interacting matter. We consider the extreme cases of very high densities, where weak-coupling approaches may in principle give reasonable results, and very low densities, where we use the framework of heavy-baryon chiral perturbation theory. We also speculate on the nature of the chiral transition and present possible astrophysical implications.