holographic baryons, dense matter and neutron star mergers

The gauge/gravity duality, combined with information from lattice qcd, nuclear theory, and perturbative qcd, can be used to constrain the equation of state of hot and dense qcd. i discuss an approach based on the holographic v-qcd model. i start by reviewing the results from the construction of the v-qcd baryon as a soliton of the gauge fields in the model.then i discuss implementing nuclear matter in the model by using a homogeneous approach. the model predicts a strongly first order phase transition from nuclear to quark matter with a critical endpoint. by using the model in state-of-the-art simulations of neutron star binaries with parameters consistent with gw170817, i study the formation of quark matter during the merger process.