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

Understand

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.