Spinodal Instabilities of Baryon-Rich Quark-gluon Plasma in the PNJL Model

TL;DR

This study investigates the spinodal instability of baryon-rich quark-gluon plasma using the PNJL model, revealing how various factors influence the unstable regions and growth rates of modes relevant to heavy ion collisions.

Contribution

The paper provides a detailed analysis of spinodal instabilities in the PNJL model, including effects of wave number, Polyakov loop, vector interactions, and collisions, which were not comprehensively studied before.

Findings

Spinodal unstable region shrinks with increasing wave number.

Polyakov loop reduces the size of the unstable region.

Collisional effects decrease the growth rate of unstable modes.

Abstract

Using the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinia (PNJL) model, we study the spinodal instability of a baryon-rich quark-gluon plasma in the linear response theory. We find that the spinodal unstable region in the temperature and density plane shrinks with increasing wave number of the unstable mode and is also reduced if the effect of Polyakov loop is not included. In the small wave number or long wavelength limit, the spinodal boundaries in both cases of with and without the Polyakov loop coincide with those determined from the isothermal spinodal instability in the thermodynamic approach. Also, the vector interactions among quarks is found to suppress unstable modes of all wave numbers. Moreover, the growth rate of unstable modes initially increases with the wave number but is reduced when the wave number becomes large. Including the collisional effect from quark scattering via the linearized Boltzmann equation, we further find that it decreases the growth rate of unstable modes of all wave numbers. Relevance of these results to relativistic heavy ion collisions is discussed.