Flip-flop and deconfinement in a string gas

We study the thermodynamics of a toy model consisting of massless pointlike charges connected pairwise by strings of a constant string tension. At low density, the constituents of this system are massive bound states of finite size; at high density, a flip-flop mechanism allows the pointlike charges to move freely over macroscopic distances. We determine the critical density at which such string gas undergoes the transition between the two states and investigate the nature of this transition