The internal color degrees of freedom for the weakly interacting quarks and gluons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the explicit role of color degrees of freedom in weakly interacting quarks and gluons near the phase transition to quark-gluon plasma, using the hard thermal loop approximation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate color degrees of freedom explicitly in the equation of state and calculates related propagators and decay rates under extreme conditions.

Findings

Explicit role of color degrees of freedom demonstrated

Calculated effective colored quark and gluon propagators

Presented decay rate for hard thermal colored quark

Abstract

When the phase transition from the hadronic matter to the deconfined quark-gluon plasma or quark-gluon liquid is reached, the color degrees of freedom become important and appear explicitly in the equation of state. Under the extreme conditions, the color degrees of freedom can not decouple from the other degrees of freedom. The conservation of color charges is maintained by introducing the color chemical potentials and their fugacities. We demonstrate the explicit role of color degrees of freedom in the hot and dense matter of the weakly interacting quarks and gluons. In order to illustrate our approach, we calculate the effective colored quark and gluon propagators as well as the hard thermal colored quark and gluon loops. The calculations are preformed under the assumption of the hard thermal loop approximation. Finally, we present the decay rate for the hard thermal colored quark. The present calculation is relevant to the quarks and gluons which are not truly deconfined quark-gluon plasma and behave as a fluid in the RHIC energy. The model can be explored in the LHC energy.