The Role of Bag Surface Tension in Color Confinement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model linking surface tension of quark-gluon bags to color confinement, enabling estimation of the QCD phase diagram endpoint and explaining lattice QCD observations.

Contribution

It presents a novel cylindrical bag model with surface tension, accounting for topological free energy and negative surface tension, to analyze color confinement and phase transitions in QCD.

Findings

Derived relation between string tension and surface tension, pressure, radius.

Estimated bag surface tension at zero temperature from lattice QCD data.

Explained the maximum of tube entropy as a sign of fractional surface formation.

Abstract

We discuss here the novel view at the color confinement which, on the one hand, allows us to find out the surface tension coefficient of quark gluon bags and, under a plausible assumption, to determine the endpoint temperature of the QCD phase diagram, on the other hand. The present model considers the confining color tube as the cylindrical quark gluon bag with non-zero surface tension. A close inspection of the free energies of elongated cylindrical bag and the confining color tube that connects the static quark-antiquark pair allows us to find out the string tension in terms of the surface tension, thermal pressure and the bag radius. Using the derived relation it is possible to estimate the bag surface tension at zero temperature directly from the lattice QCD data and to estimate the (tri)critical endpoint temperature. In the present analysis the topological free energy of the cylindrical bag is accounted for the first time. The requirement of positive entropy density of such bags leads to negative values of the surface tension coefficient of quark gluon bags at the cross-over region, i.e. at the continuous transition to deconfined quarks and gluons. We argue that the cross-over existence at supercritical temperatures in ordinary liquids is also provided by the negative surface tension coefficient values. It is shown that the confining tube model naturally accounts for an existence of a very pronounced surprising maximum of the tube entropy observed in the lattice QCD simulations, which, as we argue, signals about the fractional surface formation of the confining tube. In addition, using the developed formalism we suggest the gas of free tubes model and demonstrate that it contains two phases.