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.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures. Contribution to the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Holography, String Theory and Spacetime, Da Nang, Vietnam, February 202