Speaker
Description
We investigate dense nuclear matter within a unified framework that combines the quarkyonic picture with the quark-meson coupling (QMC) model, focusing on symmetric and isospin-asymmetric nuclear matter. Nucleons are described explicitly at the quark level using relativistic Gaussian quark wavefunctions, providing a microscopic realization of a dual baryon-quark description of dense matter. Nuclear interactions are incorporated self-consistently through scalar and vector mean fields acting directly on confined quarks, ensuring thermodynamic consistency and a smooth crossover from hadronic to quark-dominated regimes without invoking a sharp phase transition. We show that the onset of quark saturation is strongly correlated with the effective nucleon size; for a proton root-mean-square radius of 0.8 fm, quark saturation appears around 1.5 times the nuclear saturation density in symmetric nuclear matter. The resulting equation of state exhibits a characteristic soft-to-stiff behavior in the sound velocity and yields pressures for both symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter that are consistent with empirical constraints from heavy-ion collision experiments.