The half-skyrmion phase in a chiral-quark model

The Chiral Dilaton Model, where baryons arise as non-topological solitons built from the interaction of quarks and chiral mesons, shows in the high density low temperature regime a two phase scenario in the nuclear matter phase diagram. Dense soliton matter described by the Wigner-Seitz approximation generates a periodic potential in terms of the sigma and pion fields that leads to the formation of a band structure. The analysis up to three times nuclear matter density shows that soliton matter undergoes two separate phase transitions: a delocalization of the baryon number density leading to B = 1/2 structures, as in skyrmion matter, at moderate densities, and quark deconfinement at larger densities. This description fits well into the so-called quarkyonic phase where, before deconfinement, nuclear matter should undergo structural changes involving the restoration of fundamental symmetries of QCD.