Probing confinement by direct photons and dileptons

The intensive synchrotron radiation resulting from quarks interacting with the collective confining color field in relativistic heavy ion collisions is discussed. The spectrum of photons with large transverse momentum is calculated and compared with the experimental data to demonstrate the feasibility of this type of radiation. A study of the earlier predicted azimuthal anisotropy in the angular distribution of dileptons with respect to the three-momentum of the pair is performed as well. This boundary-induced mechanism of lepton pair production is shown to possess the features that are distinctly different from the standard mechanisms and can potentially provide an efficient probe of quark-gluon plasma formation.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, Fig., Refs. and explanations added, typos corrected, text revise

Towards azimuthal anisotropy of direct photons

Intensive radiation of magnetic bremsstrahlung type (synchrotron radiation) resulting from the interaction of escaping quarks with the collective confining colour field is discussed as a new possible mechanism of observed direct photon anisotropy.Comment: 3 pages, Comments and references added, accepted to JETP Letters (Pis'ma v ZhETF

Strange quark matter: mapping QCD lattice results to finite baryon density by a quasi-particle model

A quasi-particle model is presented which describes QCD lattice results for the 0, 2 and 4 quark-flavor equation of state. The results are mapped to finite baryo-chemical potentials. As an application of the model we make a prediction of deconfined matter with appropriate inclusion of strange quarks and consider pure quark stars.Comment: invited talk at Strangeness 2000, Berkeley; prepared version for the proceedings, 5 page

Chiral condensates and size of the sigma term

The in-medium chiral condensate is studied with a new approach which has the advantage of no need for extra assumptions on the current mass derivatives of model parameters. It is shown that the pion-nucleon sigma term is 9/2 times the average current mass of light quarks, if quark confinement is linear. Considering both perturbative and non-perturbative interactions, the chiral condensate decreases monotonously with increasing densities, approaching to zero at about 4 fm^{-3}.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, elsart styl

A new regime of anomalous penetration of relativistically strong laser radiation into an overdense plasma

It is shown that penetration of relativistically intense laser light into an overdense plasma, accessible by self-induced transparency, occurs over a finite length only. The penetration length depends crucially on the overdense plasma parameter and increases with increasing incident intensity after exceeding the threshold for self-induced transparency. Exact analytical solutions describing the plasma-field distributions are presented.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures in 2 separate eps files; submitted to JETP Letter

Gluon Quasiparticles and the Polyakov Loop

A synthesis of Polyakov loop models of the deconfinement transition and quasiparticle models of gluon plasma thermodynamics leads to a class of models in which gluon quasiparticles move in a non-trivial Polyakov loop background. These models are successful candidates for explaining both critical behavior and the equation of state for the SU(3) gauge theory at temperatures above the deconfinement temperature T_c. Polyakov loops effects are most important at intermediate temperatures from T_c up to roughly 2.5 T_c, while quasiparticle mass effects provide the dominant correction to blackbody behavior at higher temperatures.Comment: 6 pages, 7 eps figures, revtex

Glueballs, gluon condensate, and pure glue QCD below T_c

A quasiparticle description of pure glue QCD thermodynamics at T<T_c is proposed and compared to recent lattice data. Given that a gas of glueballs with constant mass cannot quantitatively reproduce the early stages of the deconfinement phase transition, the problem is to identify a relevant mechanism leading to the observed sudden increase of the pressure, trace anomaly, etc. It is shown that the strong decrease of the gluon condensate near T_c combined with the increasing thermal width of the lightest glueballs might be the trigger of the phase transition.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures; analysis refined in v2, explanations added; v3 to appear in EPJ

A thermodynamically consistent quasi-particle model without temperature-dependent infinity of the vacuum zero point energy

In this paper, an improved quasi-particle model is presented. Unlike the previous approach of establishing quasi-particle model, we introduce a classical background field (it is allowed to depend on the temperature) to deal with the infinity of thermal vacuum energy which exists in previous quasi-particle models. After taking into account the effect of this classical background field, the partition function of quasi-particle system can be made well-defined. Based on this and following the standard ensemble theory, we construct a thermodynamically consistent quasi-particle model without the need of any reformulation of statistical mechanics or thermodynamical consistency relation. As an application of our model, we employ it to the case of (2+1) flavor QGP at zero chemical potential and finite temperature and obtain a good fit to the recent lattice simulation results of S. Borsanyi $et$ $al$. A comparison of the result of our model with early calculations using other models is also presented. It is shown that our method is general and can be generalized to the case where the effective mass depends not only on the temperature but also on the chemical potential.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Temperature-dependent cross sections for meson-meson nonresonant reactions in hadronic matter

We present a potential of which the short-distance part is given by one gluon exchange plus perturbative one- and two-loop corrections and of which the large-distance part exhibits a temperature-dependent constant value. The Schrodinger equation with this temperature-dependent potential yields a temperature dependence of the mesonic quark-antiquark relative-motion wave function and of meson masses. The temperature dependence of the potential, the wave function and the meson masses brings about temperature dependence of cross sections for the nonresonant reactions pi pi -> rho rho for I=2, KK -> K* K* for I=1, KK* -> K* K* for I=1, pi K -> rho K* for I=3/2, pi K* -> rho K* for I=3/2, rho K -> rho K* for I=3/2 and pi K* -> rho K for I=3/2. As the temperature increases, the rise or fall of peak cross sections is determined by the increased radii of initial mesons, the loosened bound states of final mesons, and the total-mass difference of the initial and final mesons. The temperature-dependent cross sections and meson masses are parametrized.Comment: 42 pages with 10 figure

Trace Anomaly and Quasi-Particles in Finite Temperature SU(N) Gauge Theory

We consider deconfined matter in SU(N) gauge theory as an ideal gas of transversely polarized quasi-particle modes having a temperature-dependent mass m(T). Just above the transition temperature, the mass is assumed to be determined by the critical behavior of the energy density and the screening length in the medium. At high temperature, it becomes proportional to T as the only remaining scale. The resulting (trace anomaly based) interaction measure Delta=(e - 3P)/T^4 and energy density are found to agree well with finite temperature SU(3) lattice calculations.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures; references added for version