  Transitions between centre sectors are related to confinement in pure
Yang-Mills theories. We study the impact of these transitions in QCD-like
theories for which centre symmetry is explicitly broken by the presence of
matter. For low temperatures, we provide numerical evidence that centre
transitions do occur with matter merely providing a bias towards the trivial
centre sector until centre symmetry is spontaneously broken at high
temperatures. The phenomenological consequences of these transitions for dense
hadron matter are illustrated in an SU(3) effective quark theory: centre
dressed quarks undergo condensation due to Bose-type statistics forming a
hitherto unknown state of dense but cold quark matter.

High Energy Physics - Lattice;High Energy Physics - Phenomenology;High Energy Physics - Theory;Nuclear Theory