Temperature dependent Nucleon Mass and entropy bound inequality

Abstract

Mass of a baryon as a function of temperature is calculated using colour-singlet partition function for massless quarks (with two flavours) and abelian gluons confined in a bag with a temperature dependent bag pressure constant $B(T)$. The non-perturbative aspect of QCD interaction is included through colour-singlet restriction on quark-gluon partition function in a phenomenological way. The entropy bound inequality $S/E\le 2\pi R/\hslash c$, where $S,E$ and $R$ are entropy, energy and radius, respectively of the enclosed system with $\hslash c=197.331$ MeVfm, is found to be consistent with the equilibrium solutions of the baryon mass upto a temperature $T_E$. There is a region of temperature $T_E<T<T_C$ ($T_C$ is critical temperature for quark-gluon plasma formation) in which no admissible equilibrium states exist for the bag. We say that the system expriences a phase jump from hadron to quark-gluon plasma through thermodynamic non-equlibrium processes.

Latex file(3 figures obtainable from first author)