The strangeness content of hadronic matter is studied in a string-flip model
that reproduces various aspects of the QCD-inspired phenomenology, such as
quark clustering at low density and color deconfinement at high density, while
avoiding long range van der Waals forces. Hadronic matter is modeled in terms
of its quark constituents by taking into account its internal flavor (u,d,s)
and color (red, blue, green) degrees of freedom. Variational Monte-Carlo
simulations in three spatial dimensions are performed for the ground-state
energy of the system. The onset of the transition to strange matter is found to
be influenced by weak, yet not negligible, clustering correlations. The phase
diagram of the system displays an interesting structure containing both
continuous and discontinuous phase transitions. Strange matter is found to be
absolutely stable in the model.Comment: 14 pages, 1 table, 8 eps figures, revtex. Submitted to Phys. Rev. C,
Presented at INPC2001 Berkeley, Ca. july 29-Aug