Conditions for confinement and freeze-out

Matter implies the existence of a large-scale connected cluster of a uniform nature. The appearance of such clusters as a function of hadron density is specified by percolation theory. We can therefore formulate the freeze-out of interacting hadronic matter in terms of the percolation of hadronic clusters. The resulting freeze-out condition as a function of temperature and baryo-chemical potential interpolates between resonance gas behavior at low baryon density and repulsive nucleonic matter at low temperature, and it agrees well with the data.Received: 10 September 2003, Published online: 7 November 2003