Mesons, baryons and the confinement/deconfinement transition
High Energy Physics - Phenomenology
2026-03-04 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory
Abstract
We identify an observable that could operate as a probe of the quark versus hadron content of a bath of quarks and gluons at finite temperature and chemical potential. To this purpose, we relate the Polyakov and anti-Polyakov loops, which determine how energetically costly it is to bring an external static quark or antiquark probe into the thermal bath, to the ability of that medium to provide favorable conditions for the formation of meson-like or baryon-like configurations that would screen the probes.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2504.06459,
title = {Mesons, baryons and the confinement/deconfinement transition},
author = {V. Tomas Mari Surkau and Urko Reinosa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.06459},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
published version, 14 pages, 6 figures, extended discussion