Impact of the strong electromagnetic field on the QCD effective potential for homogeneous Abelian gluon field configurations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how strong electromagnetic fields influence the QCD effective potential for homogeneous Abelian gluon configurations, revealing potential catalysis of deconfinement transitions in high-energy collisions.

Contribution

It provides a one-loop evaluation of the quark contribution to the QCD effective potential under external electromagnetic fields, analyzing extrema structure and specific gluon configurations.

Findings

Electromagnetic fields can catalyze deconfinement transitions.

Analysis of potential extrema depends on angles between fields.

Study models electromagnetic effects in relativistic heavy ion collisions.

Abstract

The one-loop quark contribution to the QCD effective potential for the homogeneous Abelian gluon field in the presence of external strong electromagnetic field is evaluated. The structure of extrema of the potential as a function of the angles between chromoelectric, chromomagnetic and electromagnetic fields is analyzed. In this setup, the electromagnetic field is considered as an external one while the gluon field represents domain structured nonperturbative gluon configurations related to the QCD vacuum in the confinement phase. Two particularly interesting gluon configurations, (anti-)self-dual and crossed orthogonal chromomagnetic and chromoelectric fields, are discussed specifically. Within this simplified framework it is shown that the strong electromagnetic fields can play a catalysing role for a deconfinement transition. At the qualitative level, the present consideration can be seen as a highly simplified study of an impact of the electromagnetic fields generated in relativistic heavy ion collisions on the strongly interacting hadronic matter.