At very high baryon densities, such as in compact star cores, neighboring nucleons’ quark–gluon wave functions overlap and delocalize, suggesting a percolation-like transition. Modeling this regime is difficult because nucleons gradually lose their identities and cease to be good degrees of freedom. We present a relativistic field theory that encodes nucleon internal structure via modified nucleon field operators. Instead of using complicated many-quark composite fields, the theory keeps nucleon fields whose anticommutation relations differ only slightly from the canonical fermionic form, with density-dependent deviations reflecting nucleon structure. Within a mean-field treatment, we compute the equation of state and the speed of sound for cold neutron matter. Abstract Published by the Jagiellonian University 2026 authors
Krein et al. (Fri,) studied this question.