A percolation transition in Yang-Mills matter at finite number of colours

Abstract

We examine baryonic matter at quark chemical potential of the order of the confinement scale, ${\mu }_q\sim \text{lqcd}$. In this regime, quarks are supposed to be confined but baryons are close to the ``tightly packed limit'' where they nearly overlap in configuration space. We show that this system will exhibit a percolation phase transition {\em when varied in the number of colours} $N_c$: at high $N_c$, large distance correlations at quark level are possible even if the quarks are essentially confined. At low $N_c$, this does not happen. We discuss the relevance of this for dense nuclear matter, and argue that our results suggest a new ``phase transition'', varying $N_c$ at constant ${\mu }_q$.

Comments: Accepted for publication, Physical Review Letters. Title changed from original, "Quarkyonic percolation at finite number of colors", at the request of the editor