The Proton Mass and Scale-Invariant Hidden Local Symmetry for Compressed Baryonic Matter
I discuss how to access dense baryonic matter of compact stars by combining hidden local symmetry (HLS) of light-quark vector mesons with spontaneously broken scale invariance of a (pseudo) Nambu-Goldstone boson, dilaton, in a description that parallels the approach to dilatonic Higgs. Some of the surprising observations are that the bulk of proton mass is not Nambu-Goldstonian, parity doubling emerges at high density and the EoS of baryonic matter can be soft enough for heavy-ion processes at low density and stiff enough at high density for ∼ 2 solar mass neutron stars.