The nucleon is made of an outer, bosonic cloud (quark-antiquark
condensate) and an inner core. The condensate breaks the chiral symmetry
and its excitation spectrum, as seen in meson-nucleon reactions and in
deep inelastic electron nucleon reactions, is of phonon type, satisfying
Landau’s criterion for superfluidity (A. Mann and R.M. Weiner, Nuovo Cimento
10A (1972) 625). At a critical temperature of the order of 170 MeV, the
superfluid undergoes a phase transition to a new state of matter, quark
matter, in which the chiral symmetry is restored (S. Eliezer and R. M.
Weiner, Phys.Rev. 13 (1976) 87). This phase transition is the subject of
intensive experimental and theoretical search through heavy ion reactions.