A phenomenological quark matter equation of state

Both the MIT bag model and potential models are able to reproduce static properties of hadrons (e.g. their mass spectrum) with reasonable accuracy. However, while the extrapolation of the MIT bag model from hadrons to dense matter is rather straightforward, it is not the same for potential models. To deal with this problem, in this paper, the methods of relativistic quantum many-body theory are applied to the study of quark matter interacting through an instantaneous potential at zero temperature. It is shown that under some conditions, the quark plasma undergoes a first order transition from a massive state at low density to a gas of particles of decreasing mass at high density—as one expects from perturbative QCD. In addition, immediately after the transition, the quarks are in a collective bound state, which might perhaps be interpreted as the fact that they just start to leave the inside of hadrons.