Glueballs, gluon condensate, and pure glue QCD below T_c

Abstract

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.

5 pages, 5 figures; analysis refined in v2, explanations added; v3 to appear in EPJC

References in corpus (10)

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• The Physics of Glueballs
• Radiative and Collisional Jet Energy Loss in the Quark-Gluon Plasma at RHIC
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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Shear and bulk viscosities for pure glue matter
• Comments on Yang-Mills thermodynamics, the Hagedorn spectrum and the gluon gas
• A reanalysis of Finite Temperature SU(N) Gauge Theory
• Thermodynamics of the Glueball Resonance Gas
• Ultra-light Glueballs in Quark-Gluon Plasma
• Glueballs and vector mesons at NICA