Novel Collective Excitations and the Quasi-Particle Picture of Quarks Coupled with a Massive Boson at Finite Temperature

Abstract

Motivated by the observation that there may exist hadronic excitations even in the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) phase, we investigate how the properties of quarks, especially within the quasi-particle picture, are affected by the coupling with bosonic excitations at finite temperature (T), employing Yukawa models with a massive scalar (pseudoscalar) and vector (axial-vector) boson of mass m. The quark spectral function and the quasi-dispersion relations are calculated at one-loop order. We find that there appears a three-peak structure in the quark spectral function with a collective nature when T is comparable with m, irrespective of the type of boson considered. Such a multi-peak structure was first found in a chiral model yielding scalar composite bosons with a decay width. We elucidate the mechanism through which the new quark collective excitations are realized in terms of the Landau damping of a quark (an antiquark) induced by scattering with the thermally excited boson, which gives rise to mixing and hence a level repulsion between a quark (antiquark) and an antiquark-hole (quark-hole) in the thermally excited antiquark (quark) distribution. Our results suggest that the quarks in the QGP phase can be described within an interesting quasi-particle picture with a multi-peak spectral function. Because the models employed here are rather generic, our findings may represent a universal phenomenon for fermions coupled to a massive bosonic excitation with a vanishing or small width. The relevance of these results to other fields of physics, such as neutrino physics, is also briefly discussed. In addition, we describe a new aspect of the plasmino excitation obtained in the hard-thermal loop approximation.

41 pages, 39 eps figures, version to appear in Prog. Theor. Phys, comments on effects of the quark mass and the chemical potential added, typos corrected, some figures improved

References in corpus (1)

• The Ideal Liquid Discovered by RHIC, Infrared Slavery Above and Hadronic Freedom Below $T_c$

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