Baryons and the phase diagram for a large number of colors and flavors

Understand

We consider the possible phases of a non-Abelian gauge theory, as a function of temperature and quark chemical potential, when both the number of colors and flavors is very large.

• Generally, a large number of flavors washes out deconfining phase transitions.
• We show, however, that the degeneracy of even the lightest baryons is exponentially large.
• This implies that the baryon number (or fluctuations thereof, at zero chemical potential) is an order parameter in the limit of an infinite number of colors and flavors.