Deconfinement, Monopoles and New Phenomena in Heavy Ion Collisions

We discuss various manifestations of the "magnetic scenario" for the quark-gluon plasma viewed as a mixture of two plasmas, of electrically (quark and gluons) as well as magnetically charged quasiparticles. Near the deconfinement phase transition, $T\approx T_c$ very small density of free quarks should lead to negligible screening of electric field while magnetic screening remains strong. The consequence of this should be existence of a "corona" of the QGP, in a way similar to that of the Sun, in which electric fields influence propagation of perturbations and even form metastable flux tubes. The natural tool for its description is (dual) magnetohydrodynamics: among observable consequences is splitting of sound into two modes, with larger and smaller velocity. The latter can be zero, hinting for formation of pressure-stabilized flux tubes. Remarkably, recent experimental discoveries at RHIC show effects similar to expected for "corona structures". In dihadron correlation function with large-$p_t$ trigger there are a "cone" and a "hard ridge",while the so called "soft ridge" is a similar structure seen without hard trigger. They seem to be remnants of flux tubes, which -- contrary to naive expectations -- seem to break less often in near-$T_c$ matter than do confining strings in vacuum.Comment: Written version of talk given at "Shifmania" conference, June 2009, Minneapolis, related to 60-the birthday of Misha Shifma

Recent progress in understanding deconfinement and chiral restoration phase transitions

Paradigme shift in gauge topology, from instantons to their constituents -- instanton-dyons -- has recently lead to very significant advances. Like instantons, they have fermionic zero modes, and their collectivization at sufficiently high density explains the chiral symmetry breaking. Unlike instantons, these objects have electric and magnetic charges. Their back reaction on the mean value of the Polyakov line (holonomy) allows to explain the deconfinement transition. The talk summarizes recent works on the dyon ensemble, done in the mean field approximation (MFA), and also by direct numerical statistical simulation. Introduction of non-trivial quark periodicity conditions leads to drastic changes in both deconfinement and chiral transitions. In particulaly, in the so called Z(N_c)-QCD model the former gets much stronger, while the latter does not seem to occur at all.Comment: XIIth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum, 28 Aug to 4 Sep 201

Comments on the CMS discovery of the "Ridge" in High Multiplicity pp collisions at LHC

A very recent paper by the CMS collaboration \cite{cms_ridge} has created large discussion in the media, which call it important but did not explain why, in some places even calling it "unundestandable". While it is of course too soon to know what causes the correlations in question, a very similar observation in heavy ion collisions at RHIC has rather simple explanation related to explosion of high energy density matter. Perhaps this observation is the first hint for an explosive behavior in pp, which was anticipated and looked for for decades, yet never been seen