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## 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, $\mu_q\sim \lqcd$. 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 $\mu_q$.Comment: Accepted for publication, Physical Review Letters. Title changed from original, "Quarkyonic percolation at finite number of colors", at the request of the edito

Topics: Nuclear Theory, High Energy Physics - Lattice, High Energy Physics - Phenomenology, High Energy Physics - Theory
Year: 2011
DOI identifier: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.152301
OAI identifier: oai:arXiv.org:1103.4824