Topology change, emergent symmetries and compact star matter

Abstract

Abstract Topology effects have being extensively studied and confirmed in strongly correlated condensed matter physics. In the limit of large number of colors, baryons can be regarded as topological objects—skyrmions—and the baryonic matter can be regarded as a skyrmion matter. We review in this paper the generalized effective field theory for dense compact-star matter constructed with the robust inputs obtained from the skyrmion approach to dense nuclear matter, relying on possible “emergent” scale and local flavor symmetries at high density. All nuclear matter properties from the saturation density n 0 up to several times n 0 can be fairly well described. A uniquely novel—and unorthdox—feature of this theory is the precocious appearance of the pseudo-conformal sound velocity v s 2 / c 2 ≈ 1 / 3 $v^{2}_{s}/c^{2} \approx 1/3$ , with the non-vanishing trace of the energy momentum tensor of the system. The topology change encoded in the density scaling of low energy constants is interpreted as the quark-hadron continuity in the sense of Cheshire Cat Principle (CCP) at density ≳ 2 n 0 $\gtrsim 2n_{0}$ in accessing massive compact stars. We confront the approach with the data from GW170817 and GW190425.

Keywords

• Topology change
• Emergent symmetry
• Compact star matter
• Gravitational wave