The Quark Structure of the Nucleon and Moat Regimes in Nuclear Matter

Abstract

We employ a model of nuclear structure that takes into account the quark substructure of the baryons to understand the behavior of static two-point correlation functions of meson fields in dense nuclear matter. We show that these correlation functions display ``moat'' regimes, where the inverse static correlation function is nonmonotonic in momentum space. This can have interesting consequences for the nature of nuclear matter, and it strengthens the possibility of a liquid-crystal phase for high densities.