From confinement to new states of dense QCD matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how centre sector transitions influence dense QCD matter, revealing a novel state of cold, dense quark matter formed through centre-dressed quark condensation, with implications for understanding confinement and phase transitions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that centre sector transitions occur in QCD-like theories with matter, leading to a new dense quark matter state characterized by centre-dressed quark condensation.

Findings

Centre transitions occur at low temperatures with matter biasing towards trivial centre sector.

Centre-dressed quarks condense due to Bose statistics, forming a new dense quark matter state.

Centre symmetry is spontaneously broken at high temperatures.

Abstract

Transitions between centre sectors are related to confinement in pure Yang-Mills theories. We study the impact of these transitions in QCD-like theories for which centre symmetry is explicitly broken by the presence of matter. For low temperatures, we provide numerical evidence that centre transitions do occur with matter merely providing a bias towards the trivial centre sector until centre symmetry is spontaneously broken at high temperatures. The phenomenological consequences of these transitions for dense hadron matter are illustrated in an SU(3) effective quark theory: centre dressed quarks undergo condensation due to Bose-type statistics forming a hitherto unknown state of dense but cold quark matter.