Baryon Density Correlations in High Temperature Hadronic Matter

Abstract

As part of an ongoing effort to characterize the high temperature phase of QCD, in a numerical simulation using the staggered fermion scheme, we measure the quark baryon density in the vicinity of a fixed test quark at high temperature and compare it with similar measurements at low temperature and at the crossover temperature. We find an extremely weak correlation at high temperature, suggesting that small color singlet clusters are unimportant in the thermal ensemble. We also find that at $T=0.75T_c$ the total induced quark number shows a surprisingly large component attributable to baryonic screening. A companion simulation of a simple flux tube model produces similar results and also suggests a plausible phenomenological scenario: As the crossover temperature is approached from below, baryonic states proliferate. Above the crossover temperature the mean size of color singlet clusters grows explosively, resulting in an effective electrostatic deconfinement.

26 pp, RevTeX, 12 postscript figures, combined in a single shell archive file. (Also available in 13 postscript files by anonymous ftp from einstein.physics.utah.edu, /pub/milc/paper.sh.Z.)

References in corpus (3)

• The Spatial String Tension in the Deconfined Phase of the (3+1)-Dimensional SU(2) Gauge Theory
• Finite-size and quark mass effects on the QCD spectrum with two flavors
• Baryon Density Correlations in the Quark Plasma, MIMD Lattice Calculation

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Two-Flavor Staggered Fermion Thermodynamics at N_t = 12
• The QCD phase diagram according to the center group
• Baryon Fluctuations and the QCD Phase Transition
• Potts Flux Tube Model at Nonzero Chemical Potential
• Quarks and Triality in a Finite Volume
• Two-flavor staggered-fermion thermodynamics at $N_t=12$
• Taylor- and fugacity expansion for the effective Z(3) spin model of QCD at finite density