This memorial volume is dedicated to physicist Gerald E Brown (1926-2013) or 'Gerry' as he was known to his many students, postdocs, colleagues and friends. As written by one of the contributors to this book, 'Gerry was an inspiring father figure for generations of theoretical nuclear physicists and a great human being'.This book covers a wide range of topics in nuclear physics, including nuclear structure, two- and three-body nuclear forces, strangeness nuclear physics, chiral symmetry, hadrons in dense medium, hidden local symmetry, heavy quark symmetry, cosmic neutrinos, nuclear double-beta decay, neutron stars, gravitational waves, renormalization group methods, exotic nuclei, electron ion collider (EIC), and much more. Most of the authors are Gerry's former students and collaborators.We hope readers will find this book very interesting not only for its physics content but also for the window it gives into Gerry's personal legacy and humanity. This book has vivid recollections of Gerry at Stony Brook, Princeton and Copenhagen, together with his humor and his very special intuitive way of thinking.

This book presents, in the form of reviews by world's leading physicists in wide-ranging fields in theoretical physics, the influence and prescience of Skyrme's daring idea of 1960, originally conceived for nuclear physics, that fermions can arise from bosons via topological solitons, pervasively playing a powerful role in wide-ranging areas of physics, from nuclear/astrophysics, to particle physics, to string theory and to condensed matter physics.The skyrmion description, both from gauge theory and from gauge/gravity duality, offers solutions to some long-standing and extremely difficult problems at high baryonic density, inaccessible by QCD proper. It also offers explanations and makes startling predictions for fascinating new phenomena in condensed matter systems. In both cases, what is at the core is the topology although the phenomena are drastically different, even involving different spacetime dimensions.This second edition has been expanded with addition of new reviews and extensively updated to take into account the latest developments in the field.

Effective field theories have been widely used in nuclear physics. This volume is devoted to exploring the intricate structure of compact-star matter inaccessible directly from QCD. It is principally anchored on hidden symmetries and topology presumed to be encoded in QCD. It differs from standard effective field theory and energy density functional approaches in that it exploits renormalization-group flow in the complex 'vacuum' sliding with density inferred from topology change identified as a manifestation of baryon-quark continuity in dense matter. It makes a variety of predictions that drastically differ from the conventional treatments that could be tested by upcoming terrestrial and astrophysical experiments.This monograph recounts how to go, in one unique field theoretic formalism in terms of hadronic degrees of freedom, from finite nuclei to dense compact-star matter that could be explored in RIB-type machines in nuclear physics as well as in LIGO-type gravity waves in astrophysics.