Baryon and meson screening masses

TL;DR

This paper calculates screening masses for light-quark mesons and baryons in a quark-gluon plasma using Dyson-Schwinger equations, revealing persistent correlations above the deconfinement temperature and degeneracy of parity partners at high temperatures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Faddeev equation construction for baryons and explores the behavior of screening masses across the deconfinement transition in a strongly-coupled plasma.

Findings

Strong correlations persist above T_c

Degeneracy between parity partners at T > 1.3T_c

Predictions align with lattice QCD results

Abstract

In a strongly-coupled quark-gluon plasma, collective excitations of gluons and quarks should dominate over the excitation of individual quasi-free gluon and quark modes. To explore this possibility, we computed screening masses for ground-state light-quark mesons and baryons at leading-order in a symmetry-preserving truncation scheme for the Dyson-Schwinger equations using a confining formulation of a contact-interaction at nonzero temperature. Meson screening masses are obtained from Bethe-Salpeter equations; and baryon analogues from a novel construction of the Faddeev equation, which employs an improved quark-exchange approximation in the kernel. Our treatment implements a deconfinement transition that is coincident with chiral symmetry restoration in the chiral limit, when both transitions are second order. Despite deconfinement, in all T=0 bound-state channels, strong correlations persist above the critical temperature, T>T_c; and, in the spectrum defined by the associated screening masses, degeneracy between parity-partner correlations is apparent for T >1.3T_c. Notwithstanding these results, there are reasons (including Golberger-Treiman relations) to suppose that the inertial masses of light-quark bound-states, when they may be defined, vanish at the deconfinement temperature; and that this is a signal of bound-state dissolution. Where a sensible comparison is possible, our predictions are consistent with results from contemporary numerical simulations of lattice-regularised QCD.