A QUARK MODEL FOR NUCLEAR MATTER

Properties of nuclear matter are calculated with a quark model in the spirit of the MIT bag model.A many body wavefunction is written in terms of the quark degrees of freedom. With this wavefunction local correlations are built in the many quark system such that three quarks close to each other are dominantly in a color singlet nucleon state. The energy of the system is calculated as the sum of the contributions from, the kinetic energy of the quarks,a bag energy proportional to the volume of the system and the interaction of the quarks through gluon exchange treated in perturbation theory to lowest order in the strong coupling constant ac,.The energy of an uncorrelated fermi gas is calculated within the same approximation.At low densities,the system described by the correlated wavefunction has a lower energy per baryon compared to the fermi gas whereas the fermi gas gives a lower energy at high densities.This result suggests a transition from the correlated state of quark matter,i.e. nuclear matter,at low densities to-a quark fermi gas at high densities.This calculation indicates that this transition can be expected to occur at a few times the normal nuclear density