Thermodynamic Investigation of the QCD Phase Diagram with 2+1 Quark Flavors

Abstract

This work deals with the deconfinement phase transition from a hadronic gas (HG) phase consisting of massive pions, to a quark–gluon plasma (QGP) phase consisting of gluons, massless up and down quarks and massive strange quarks, in addition to their antiquarks. Based on the Bag and coexistence models, we study the variations of pressure characterizing both HG and QGP phases. For the latter, we calculate the partition function of the color-singlet QGP within the projection method using a density of states containing the volume term only. We investigate the phase diagram of the strongly interacting matter, in the µ–T plane, in several cases: in the HG phase, we consider massless pions then we account for their masses, and in the QGP phase, first we take it consisting of two massless u and d quarks, then we consider additional massive strange quarks.

Keywords

• deconfinement phase transition
• phase diagram
• first order phase transition