Aspects of thermal strange quark production: the deconfinement and chiral phase transitions

TL;DR

This paper investigates how deconfinement and chiral phase transitions influence thermal strange quark production using the three-flavor PNJL model, highlighting the dominance of gluonic processes at certain temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of gluonic effects on strange quark production across phase transitions within the PNJL framework, revealing a novel temperature-dependent dominance of gluonic contributions.

Findings

Gluonic contributions dominate strange quark production at specific temperatures.

Identification of the temperature where gluonic processes surpass quark-antiquark processes.

Comparison shows the phenomenon differs from free perturbation theory results.

Abstract

We study the gluonic sector of the three-flavor PNJL model by obtaining the adjoint Polyakov loop and the gluon distribution function in the mean-field approximation. Besides, we explore the thermal strange quark pair-production processes, $q\bar {q} \to s\bar {s}$ and $gg \to s \bar {s}$, with the aid of the three-flavor PNJL model. The results help us identify the temperature where the gluonic contribution to the production rate becomes dominant, which is an innovative phenomenon compared with the result obtained in free perturbation theory.