Deconfinement in the presence of a strong magnetic background: an exercise within the MIT bag model

TL;DR

This paper investigates how extremely strong magnetic fields influence the thermal deconfinement transition in quantum chromodynamics using the MIT bag model, revealing a decrease and eventual saturation of the critical temperature.

Contribution

It provides a qualitative analysis of magnetic field effects on deconfinement transition using a simplified phenomenological model, highlighting the behavior of critical temperature under strong magnetic backgrounds.

Findings

Critical temperature decreases with increasing magnetic field.

Critical temperature saturates at very large magnetic fields.

Model offers qualitative insights despite numerical limitations.

Abstract

We study the effect of a very strong homogeneous magnetic field B on the thermal deconfinement transition within the simplest phenomenological approach: the MIT bag pressure for the quark- gluon plasma and a gas of pions for the hadronic sector. Even though the model is known to be crude in numerical precision and misses the correct nature of the (crossover) transition, it provides a simple setup for the discussion of some subtleties of vacuum and thermal contributions in each phase, and should provide a reasonable qualitative description of the critical temperature in the presence of B. We find that the critical temperature decreases, saturating for very large fields.