Hot nuclear matter with dilatons

We study hot nuclear matter in a model based on nucleon interactions deriving from the exchange of scalar and vector mesons. The main new feature of our work is the treatment of the scale breaking of quantum chromodynamics through the introduction of a dilaton field. Although the dilaton effects are quite small quantitatively, they affect the high-temperature phase transition appreciably. We find that inclusion of the dilaton leads to a metastable high-density state at zero pressure, similar to that found by Glendenning who considered instead the admixture of higher baryon resonances.