Phenomenology of the three-flavor PNJL model and thermal strange quark production

TL;DR

This paper investigates the temperature-dependent behavior of the Polyakov loop and gluon spectra in the three-flavor PNJL model, focusing on thermal strange quark production rates and their relation to deconfinement and chiral symmetry.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of gluon spectra and strange quark production rates within the PNJL model considering thermal effects and mean-field approximation.

Findings

Thermal gluons significantly influence the thermodynamic pressure.

Strange quark pair-production rates increase with temperature.

Thermal effects impact quark deconfinement and chiral symmetry breaking.

Abstract

We study the temperature dependence of the adjoint Polyakov loop and its implication for the momentum spectrum of gluons in the mean-field approximation. This allows us to calculate the contribution of the thermal (transverse) gluons to the thermodynamic pressure. As an application, we evaluate the rates for the strange quark pair-production processes $q\bar{q} \to s\bar{s}$ and $gg \to s\bar{s}$ as functions of temperature including thermal effects on quark deconfinement and chiral symmetry breaking.