Dual QCD thermodynamics and quark–gluon plasma

Abstract

Using grand canonical ensemble formulation of a multi-particle statistical system, the thermodynamical description of dual QCD based on magnetic symmetry has been presented and analyzed for the quark–gluon plasma phase of hadronic matter. The dual QCD based bag construction has been shown to lead to the radial pressure on bag surface in terms of the vector glueball masses of magnetically condensed QCD vacuum. Constructing the grand canonical partition function, the energy density and plasma pressure have been derived and used to compute the critical temperatures for QGP–hadron phase transition along with its dynamics. A comparison of the values of critical temperatures for QGP–hadron phase transition with those obtained for the deconfinement-phase transition, has been shown to lead to either the relaxation of the system via a mixed phase of QGP and hot hadron gas or go through a crossover. The associated profiles of the normalized energy density and specific heat have been shown to lead to a large latent heat generation and indicate the onset of a first-order QGP phase transition which turns into a rapid crossover for the case of temperature dependent bag parameter. The squared speed of sound has been shown to act as a physical measure of large thermodynamical fluctuations near transition point. The possible implications of trace anomaly and conformal measure on QGP formation have also been discussed.