Aspects of thermal strange quark production: the deconfinement and chiral phase transitions

Abstract

We study the gluonic sector of the three-flavor PNJL model by obtaining the adjoint Polyakov loop and the gluon distribution function in the mean-field approximation. Besides, we explore the thermal strange quark pair-production processes, $q\bar{q}\to s\bar{s}$ and $gg\to s\bar{s}$, with the aid of the three-flavor PNJL model. The results help us identify the temperature where the gluonic contribution to the production rate becomes dominant, which is an innovative phenomenon compared with the result obtained in free perturbation theory.

4 pages, 2 figures, final version - To appear in the conference proceedings for Quark Matter 2009, March 30 - April 4, Knoxville, Tennessee

References in corpus (4)

• Renormalized Polyakov loops in many representations
• Enhanced strange baryon production in Au+Au collisions compared to p+p at sqrts = 200 GeV
• Three flavor Nambu-Jona Lasinio model with Polyakov loop and competition with nuclear matter
• Polyakov loop in different representations of SU(3) at finite temperature

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Entropy production and equilibration in Yang-Mills quantum mechanics