Suppression of the repulsive force in nuclear interactions near the chiral phase transition

We introduce an effective chiral Lagrangian with a dilaton responsible for the trace anomaly in QCD. As the "dilaton limit" is taken, which drives a system to near chiral restoration density, a linear sigma model emerges from the highly non-linear structure. A striking prediction is that the vector-meson--nucleon interaction gets strongly suppressed when the dilaton limit is approached. Its phenomenological implications for the thermodynamics of dense baryonic matter are briefly discussed.