Multiple evidence reveals that the vast majority of the matter content of the universe is non baryonic and electrically neutral. This component is usually called Dark Matter (DM), for its lack of electromagnetic interactions, and is measured to constitute about 25% of the energy density of the Universe. The most common hypothesis is that it consists of weakly interacting massive particles,...
We present a relativistic density functional approach to color superconducting quark matter that mimics quark confinement by a fast growth of the quasiparticle self-energy in the confining region [1]. The approach is shown to be equivalent to a chiral model of quark matter with medium dependent couplings. The approach to the conformal limit at asymptotically high densities is provided by a...
The Chiral Mean Field model (CMF) has been successful in describing the equation of state at large baryon densities, such as those found in neutron stars, neutron star mergers, and heavy-ion collisions. The MUSES collaboration has rewritten the zero-temperature CMF model from Fortran 77 into a parallelized modern C++20 using OpenMP, which has resulted in at least an order of magnitude...
NA61/SHINE has measured the first deuteron production in proton-proton interactions at 158 GeV/c (sqrt(s) = 17.3 GeV). These measurements will be presented and compared to different nuclear formation models. The two most prevalent formation models—the thermal and coalescence models—are based on different underlying physics. A better understanding of (anti)nuclei production mechanisms is...
Large-$N_c$ QCD implies a duality between confined baryons and deconfined quarks at high baryon densities; it is called Quarkyonic matter. We present a model of Quarkyonic matter that is explicitly dual between quarks and baryons. The duality means that the free energy of the matter is expressed in two ways: One is as a functional of the quark distribution function in the momentum space,...
Neutron star equations of state that can sustain heavy neutron stars over 2 Msun necessitate a large, rapid rise in the speed of sound. The family of equations of states, which assume electric neutrality along beta equilibrium and vanishing temperatures, with large bumps in the speed of sound have been suggested to be incompatible with the equation of state extracted from heavy-ion...
