Computation of pion and kaon heavy ion multiplicities in a gluon-meson model

TL;DR

This paper develops an effective QCD model to compute pion and kaon multiplicities from gluons in high energy heavy ion collisions, providing insights into the gluon-meson transition near the critical temperature.

Contribution

It introduces a novel effective approach by integrating out quark fields to model gluon to meson conversion in heavy ion collisions.

Findings

Effective gluon mass remains finite at T=Tc.

Computed pion and kaon multiplicities as functions of gluon mass.

Provides a framework for understanding hadronization in quark-gluon plasma.

Abstract

In high energy Heavy Ion Collisions, the onset of the quark-gluon plasma is the colour glass condensate, dominated by gluons. The final state is hadronic, and dominated by pions and kaons. Here we investigate an effective approach of QCD with these bosonic fields and which can help to describe the transition of gluons into light mesons. Formally, our approach consists in integrating out the quark fields from the QCD path integral, utilizing auxiliary fields. In this way the fermionic fields are replaced by light mesons, such as the pions and sigma field. We apply our effective action to compute the number of pions and kaons per gluon emitted by a Boltzmann gluon gas, their multiplicities as function of a gluon mass. We conclude that an effective gluon mass remains finite at T=Tc.