Hadronic interactions and the deconfinement phase transition

Abstract

We study the effect of hadronic interactions on the critical parameters in the entire phase space in a first-order phase transition for charge asymmetric matter (Q/B = 0.82/2.08) with zero net strangeness, which might be observed in Pb-Pb collisions at CERN's anticipated LHC. Quark matter is described by a quark-gluon plasma interacting to order g 3 in the QCD coupling constant. In the hadronic gas we consider simple models accounting for the repulsive interactions in an average way as well as a relativistic mean-field theoretical model with σ , ω, ρ and φ condensates, and compare the results.