The chicken or the egg; or Who ordered the chiral phase transition?

Abstract

We draw an analogy between the deconfining transition in the 2+1 dimensional Georgi-Glashow model and the chiral phase transition in 3+1 dimensional QCD. Based on the detailed analysis of the former (hep-th/0010201) we suggest that the chiral symmetry restoration in QCD at high temperature is driven by the thermal ensemble of baryons and anti-baryons. The chiral symmetry is restored when roughly half of the volume is occupied by the baryons. Surprisingly enough, even though baryons are rather heavy, a crude estimate for the critical temperature gives $T_c=180$ Mev. In this scenario the binding of the instantons is not the cause but rather a consequence of the chiral symmetry restoration.

22 pages, 7 figures, comments about chiral symmetry at finite nuclear density are added

References in corpus (1)

• Quark Mass and Flavour Dependence of the QCD Phase Transition

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Phase Transition in Compact QED(3) and the Josephson Junction
• Possible Pseudogap Phase in QCD
• Deconfining phase transition in the 3D Georgi-Glashow model with finite Higgs-boson mass
• Baryon as dyonic instanton-II. Baryon mass versus chiral condensate
• U_A(1) Anomaly at high temperature: the scalar-pseudoscalar splitting in QCD
• Fundamental Matter and the Deconfining Phase Transition in 2+1 D
• SUSY 3D Georgi-Glashow model at finite temperature
• On the chiral phase transition in hadronic matter
• Chiral Estimate of QCD Pseudocritical Line