Holographic baryons and instanton crystals

In a wide class of holographic models, like the one proposed by Sakai and Sugimoto, baryons can be approximated by instantons of non-Abelian gauge fields that live on the world-volume of flavor D-branes. In the leading order, those are just the Yang-Mills instantons, whose solutions can be constructed from the celebrated Atiyah-Drinfeld-Hitchin-Manin (ADHM) construction. This fact can be used to study various properties of baryons in the holographic limit. In particular, one can attempt to construct a holographic description of the cold dense nuclear matter phase of baryons. It can be argued that holographic baryons in such a regime are necessarily in a solid crystalline phase. In this review, we summarize the known results on the construction and phases of crystals of the holographic baryons.