Related papers: Mesons, baryons and the confinement/deconfinement …
We study confinement and deconfinement in dense two color QCD by analyzing the dynamics of thermal quarks and gluons. The Polyakov loop is used as a probe of the relevant thermal excitations, distinguishing quark and hadron dominated…
The Polyakov loop has been used repeatedly as an order parameter in the deconfinement phase transition in QCD. We argue that, in the confined phase, its expectation value can be represented in terms of hadronic states, similarly to the…
In a recent work, we have argued that the net quark number gained by a bath of quarks and gluons upon bringing an external static quark probe, while being equal to $1$ in the high temperature, deconfined phase, is equal to $0$ or $3$ in the…
The relation between the deconfinement and chiral phase transition is explored in the framework of an Polyakov-loop-extended two-flavor quark-meson (PQM) model. In this model the Polyakov loop dynamics is represented by a background…
The Polyakov loop potential serves to distinguish between the confined hadronic and the deconfined quark-gluon plasma phases of QCD. For Nf=2+1 quark flavors with physical masses we determine the Polyakov loop potential at finite…
In an extension of the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model where the quarks interact with the temporal gluon field, represented by the Polyakov loop, we explore the relation between the deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. The effect of…
With combined hopping parameter and strong coupling expansions, we calculate a dimensionally reduced Polyakov-loop effective theory valid for heavy quarks at nonzero temperature and arbitrary chemical potential. We numerically compute the…
We describe two independent frameworks which provide unambiguous determinations of the deconfinement and the decoupling conditions of a relativistic gas at finite temperature. First, we use the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model to compute…
The size of the average fluctuations of net baryon number and electric charge in a finite volume of hadronic matter differs widely between the confined and deconfined phases. These differences may be exploited as indicators of the formation…
In a strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma, collective excitations of gluons and quarks should dominate over the excitation of individual quasi-free gluon and quark modes. To explore this possibility, we computed screening masses for…
Confinement may be more easily demonstrated at finite temperature using the Polyakov loop than at zero temperature using the Wilson loop. A natural mechanism for confinement can arise via the coupling of the adjoint Polyakov loop to F_{mu…
The confinement mechanism proposed earlier and then successfully applied to meson spectroscopy by the author is extended over baryons. For this aim the wave functions of baryons are built as tensorial products of those corresponding to the…
At high temperature measurements of the Polyakov loop suggest a deconfinement transition to the (strongly interacting) quark-gluon plasma. At the same time at the infinitely large temperature the four-dimensional QCD is reduced to the…
The crossover from hadronic to quark matter is understood to be both a deconfinement as well as a chiral symmetry restoring transition. Here, we study observables related to both aspects using lattice simulations: the Polyakov loop and its…
In different approaches, the temperature-baryon density plane of QCD matter is studied for deconfinement and chemical freezeout boundaries. Results from various heavy-ion experiments are compared with the recent lattice simulations, the…
Quantum Chromodynamics exhibits a hadronic confined phase at low to moderate temperatures and, at a critical temperature $T_C$, undergoes a transition to a deconfined phase known as the quark-gluon plasma. The nature of this deconfinement…
We discuss an observable that probes the content of a QCD medium at finite temperature and chemical potential, the net quark number gain. It is the response of the thermal bath to a static quark or antiquark probe. While insignificant at…
The magnitude of the local fluctuations of the net baryon number and electric charge differs widely between the confined and deconfined phases, and the difference is partially frozen at an early stage in relativistic heavy ion collisions.…
The concept of studying the internal structure of mesons is explored. Mesons, which are in principle two body quark antiquark interactions, may be much easier to understand than the nucleon. Measurements of the inelastic form factors to…
We investigate the possibility for a quark-antiquark pair to form a bound state at temperatures higher than the critical one ($T>T_c$), thus after deconfinement. Our main goal is to find analytical criteria constraining the existence of…