Speaker
Description
We study cold dense single-flavor $SU(N_c)$ gauge theory in (1+1) dimensions in the thermodynamic limit using a gauge-invariant variational uniform matrix product state ansatz. This formulation provides a sign-problem-free, first-principles approach to dense QCD. We show that, at finite baryon density with $N_c=2$, the infrared behavior is consistent with a Tomonaga--Luttinger liquid: the central charge is determined to be c=1, and the two-point function of the baryon-number density exhibits spatial modulation with the wavenumber predicted by Tomonaga--Luttinger liquid theory. The Luttinger parameter varies smoothly from $K\simeq 1$ in the dilute-baryon regime to $K\simeq 1/N_c$ at higher densities, suggesting a quarkyonic crossover. Furthermore, the quark distribution reveals the coexistence of a quark Fermi sea with a baryonic infrared description, thereby realizing the quarkyonic picture from first principles. I would also like to report results for N_c>2, if time permits.