Is there a good way to assign a color scheme to a set of data?

I have three column vectors, each 1 by 999. In the first and second are x and y positions respectively of a set of 999 particles. That is, the (x,y) position of particle n is given by the n-th entry in the "x column vector" and the n-th entry in the "y column vector". In the third column vector is a list of the potential energies of each of these particles (i.e. the n-th particle's potential energy is in the n-th entry of the "potential energy column vector"). What I'd like to do is make a scatter plot of these particles and color code them by their potential energy. Is there a good way to create a color map for the particles that correlates to their potential energies?

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

I suggest you read through http://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2014/10/13/a-new-colormap-for-matlab-part-1-introduction/ and the three follow-ups, especially part 2.