We study dense nuclear and quark matter within a single microscopic approach,
namely the holographic Sakai-Sugimoto model. Nuclear matter is described via
instantons in the bulk, and we show that instanton interactions are crucial for
a continuous connection of chirally broken and chirally symmetric phases. The
continuous path from nuclear to quark matter includes metastable and unstable
stationary points of the potential, while the actual chiral phase transition
remains of first order, as in earlier approximations. We show that the model
parameters can be chosen to reproduce low-density properties of nuclear matter
and observe a non-monotonic behavior of the speed of sound as a function of the
baryon chemical potential, as suggested by constraints from QCD and
astrophysics.Comment: 28+19 pages, 5 figures; v2: clarifications and references added,
version to appear in JHE
