Relevance of glueball bound states in the Yang-Mills plasma within a many-body $T$-matrix approach

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence and significance of glueball bound states in the SU(3) Yang-Mills plasma using a non-perturbative T-matrix approach informed by lattice QCD, and compares the results to lattice data.

Contribution

It introduces a non-perturbative T-matrix formalism to analyze glueball bound states in the Yang-Mills plasma at finite temperature, incorporating lattice QCD potentials.

Findings

Glueballs as bound states of gluons are relevant in the plasma.

The equation of state matches lattice QCD data.

Analysis extends to SU(N) gauge groups.

Abstract

The strongly coupled phase of Yang-Mills plasma with gauge group SU(3) is studied in a $T$-matrix approach. The existence of lowest-lying glueballs, interpreted as bound states of two transverse gluons (quasi-particles in a many-body setup), is analyzed in a non-perturbative scattering formalism with the input of lattice-QCD static potentials. The relevance of the singlet and the (colored) octet and 27 channels at finite temperature is discussed. We compute the equation of state of the system in Dashen, Ma and Bernstein's formulation of statistical mechanics and compare to quenched SU(3) lattice data. Further analysis for the general case of SU(N) is envisaged.