Polyakov loop and gluon quasiparticles in Yang-Mills thermodynamics

Abstract

We study the interpretation of lattice data about the thermodynamics of the deconfinement phase of SUð3Þ Yang-Mills theory, in terms of gluon quasiparticles propagating in a background of a Polyakov loop. A potential for the Polyakov loop, inspired by the strong coupling expansion of the QCD action, is introduced; the Polyakov loop is coupled to transverse gluon quasiparticles by means of a gaslike effective potential. This study is useful to identify the effective degrees of freedom propagating in the gluon medium above the critical temperature. A main general finding is that a dominant part of the phase transition dynamics is accounted for by the Polyakov loop dynamics; hence, the thermodynamics can be described without the need for diverging or exponentially increasing quasiparticle masses as T ! T c , at variance respect to standard quasiparticle models.

Glueballs and the Yang-Mills plasma in aT-matrix approach

“…T c [39]. It is worth mentioning that in a recent work [40], it has been shown that the inclusion of a Polyakov loop dynamics leads to a gluon mass with a very smooth dependence on T. From HTL calculations, it is expected that at very high T, m g ðTÞ $ ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ffi S ðTÞ p T [6,38], with a quasilinear behavior for T * 2 T c . This is not the case in our model since our ansatz for the gluon mass is not inspired from HTL theory but is instead completely driven-with no freedom-by data from Ref.…”

Meson properties and phase diagrams in a SU(3) nonlocal PNJL model with lattice-QCD-inspired form factors

“…Therefore, to investigate the robustness of nonlocal PNJL models, one can modify the choice of the Polyakov-loop potential, for instance taking into account developments made in Refs. [39][40][41] or rather general prescriptions as in Refs. [42,43].…”

Impact of momentum anisotropy and turbulent chromo-fields on thermal particle production in quark–gluon-plasma medium

“…It is worth to mention that there have been other quasiparticle descriptions in the literature, which could be characterized as effective mass models [66][67][68][69], effective mass models with gluon condensate [70][71][72][73], and effective models with a Polyakov loop [74][75][76][77][78][79][80]. The effective model with a Polyakov loop in [80] has been thermodynamically consistent.…”